Frases de William Ernest Hocking

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XI : Idea in Organic Union with Feeling, p. 135.
Contexto: Love and sympathy are the activity of the idea. And in their exercise, the idea is enlarged. The lover widens his experience as the non-lover cannot. He adds to the mass of his idea-world, and acquires thereby enhanced power to appreciate all things. Is not this the sufficient solution of that long-standing difficulty between 'egoism and altruism?' The altruist alone can accumulate that treasure of idea through which all things must be enjoyed that are enjoyed. No one has, or can have, any 'egoistic' satisfaction except as a consequence of so much effective love of reality as there is in him by birth or acquisition.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XII : The Will as a Maker of Truth, p. 140.
Contexto: For maturity is marked by the preference to be defeated rather than have a subjective success. We as mature persons can worship only that which we are compelled to worship. If we are offered a man-made God and a self-answering prayer, we will rather have no God and no prayer. There can be no valid worship except that in which man is involuntarily bent by the presence of the Most Real, beyond his will.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XII : The Will as a Maker of Truth, p. 140.
Contexto: For maturity is marked by the preference to be defeated rather than have a subjective success. We as mature persons can worship only that which we are compelled to worship. If we are offered a man-made God and a self-answering prayer, we will rather have no God and no prayer. There can be no valid worship except that in which man is involuntarily bent by the presence of the Most Real, beyond his will.

Preface (20 May 1926), p. vii.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Contexto: For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. II : The Work of Religion in History, p. 22.
Contexto: What our view of the effectiveness of religion in history does at once make evident as to its nature is--first, its necessary distinction; second, its necessary supremacy. These characters though external have been so essential to its fruitfulness, as to justify the statement that without them religion is not religion. A merged religion and a negligible or subordinate religion are no religion.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XV : The Need of a God, p. 218.
Contexto: If I can reconcile myself to the certainty of death only by forgetting it, I am not happy. And if I can dispose of the fact of human misery about me only by shutting my thoughts as well as myself within my comfortable garden, I may assure myself that I am happy, but I am not. There is a skeleton in the closet of the universe, and I may at any moment be in the face of it. Happiness is inseparable from confidence in action; and confidence of action is inseparable from what the schoolmen called peace -- that is, poise of mind with reference to everything I may possibly encounter in the chances of fortune.
Now this perfect openness to experience is not possible if pain is the last word of pain. Unless there is something behind the fact of pain, some kind of mystery or problem in it whose solution shows the pain to be other than what it pretends, there is no happiness for man in this world or the next; for no matter how fair the world might in time become, the fact that it had been as bad as it is would remain an unbanishable misery, unbanishable by God or any other power.

The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience (1957), p. 5.
Contexto: Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality. This does not mean that he doubts it as a future fact. He accepts his own death, with that of others, as inevitable; plans for it; provides for the time when he shall be out of the picture. Yet, not less today than formerly, he confronts this fact with a certain incredulity regarding the scope of its destruction.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XIV : The Need of an Absolute, p. 197.
Contexto: A person who wills to have a good will, already has a good will--in its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a material advance upon the condition of submergence in that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made when one gains--nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VI : Presumptive Rights, § 20, p. 58.
Contexto: Law deals not with actual individuals, but with individuals artificially defined. We cannot say that law-makers are under an illusion to the effect that all men are equal. They do not even suppose them all alike in being reasonable, or in being well informed about the law, or in being morally sensitive about their own rights or the rights of others. Law-makers have probably never been blind about the conspicuous facts of human difference. Nevertheless, the law in every community — and not alone in modern communities — proposes to treat certain large groups of individuals as were alike "before the law."

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, p. 68.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XIV : The Need of an Absolute, p. 192.
Contexto: As in reply to the skeptic or agnostic, who asserts in despair that there is no absolute truth. The dialectician retorts: Then at least your own assertion must be absolutely true. There must be some absolute truth, for you cannot assert that there is none without self-contradiction. As in Descartes' case, the doubter is reminded of himself. There, in his own assertion, is a certainty from which he cannot escape.
This turn of thought which reminds the enquirer of himself, we shall call the reflexive turn. It reappears in all discoveries of the Absolute. It is clinching--but is likely to disappoint, even as Descartes' result disappoints. For the skeptic finds that he also was in search of objective truth: and that the absolute truth of his statement is irrelevant to his quest. Whence his skepticism toward objective truth remains unanswered.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 33, p. 74.
Contexto: It is right, or absolute right, that an individual should develop the powers that are in him. He may be said to have a "natural right" to become what he is capable of becoming. This is his only natural right.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VI : Presumptive Rights, p. 58.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. I : What is Behind Us?, p. 1.
Contexto: When law was held to come direct from the gods, it required a bold man and a prophet to propose a change in it. Perhaps it is still true that a law-maker ought to be something of a prophet. But if so, we are committed in western lands to the belief that prophetic capacity is widespread: the making of law goes on everywhere merrily and apace.
In the midst of this vast labor it becomes clear to us that the more we relieve the gods of their burdens, the more we need to know what the gods know, the general principles on which law should be made. And if this knowledge were universal, and were applied in good faith, the law-makers themselves would in turn be relieved! In either case, then, we are bound to keep trying for a systematic grasp of those principles of law which we now possess in vague and fragmentary fashion.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 35, p. 76.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. IV : The Retirement of the Intellect, p. 38.

As quoted in The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Inspirational Quotes (2005) by Wendy Toliver, p. 18.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XII : The Will as a Maker of Truth, p. 140.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 35, p. 77.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XVI : The Original Sources of the Knowledge of God, p. 237.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 32, p. 73.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VI : Presumptive Rights, § 24, p. 62.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XVI : The Original Sources of the Knowledge of God, p. 235.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XIV : The Need of an Absolute, p. 198.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XIV : The Need of an Absolute, p. 198.

The Coming World Civilization (1956), p. 7.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 30, p. 68.

Fonte: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 33, p. 75.

Fonte: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. V : Religion's Dilemma in Respect to Theory, p. 58.