William Ernest Hocking

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished; the others can only be hurt.

— William Ernest Hocking

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.

— William Ernest Hocking

I find that a man is as old as his work. If his work keeps him from moving forward, he will look forward with the work.

— William Ernest Hocking

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.

— William Ernest Hocking

We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?

— William Ernest Hocking

However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,--i.e., the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes.

— William Ernest Hocking

Every social need, such as the need for friendship, must be a party to its own satisfaction: I cannot passively find my friend as a ready-made friend; a ready-made human being he may be, but his friendship for me I must help to create by my own active resolve.

— William Ernest Hocking

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.

— William Ernest Hocking

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.

— William Ernest Hocking

There is, then, in these matters some absolute finding in the seeking: salvation is, to seek salvation, for in seeking it one has already abandoned mortality and his sin.

— William Ernest Hocking

This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them--placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be.

— William Ernest Hocking

Religion is bound up in the difference between the sense of ignorance and the sense of mystery: the former means, "I know not"; the latter means "I know not; but it is known."

— William Ernest Hocking

And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life.

— William Ernest Hocking

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.

— William Ernest Hocking

Principle I : Legal rights are presumptive rights.

— William Ernest Hocking

Principle II : The presumptions of the law are creative presumptions : they are aimed at conditions to be brought about, and only for that reason ignore conditions which exist.

— William Ernest Hocking

Principle III : Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop.

— William Ernest Hocking

Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings.

— William Ernest Hocking

Without good-will, no man has any presumptive right, except the right or opportunity to change his will, so long as there is hope of it.

— William Ernest Hocking

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.

— William Ernest Hocking

Wherever moral ambition exists, there right exists. And moral ambition itself must be presumed present in subconsciousness, even when the conscious self seems to reject it, so long as society has resources for bringing it into action; in much the same way that the life-saver presumes life to exist in the drowned man until he has exhausted his resources for recovering respiration.

— William Ernest Hocking

The only thing that can set aside a law as wrong is a better law, or an idea of a better law. And the only thing that an give a law the quality of better or worse is the concrete result which it promotes or fails to promote.

— William Ernest Hocking

Pure community is a matter of no interest to any will; but a community which pursues a common good is of supreme interest to all wills; and what we have here said is that whatever the nature of that common good … it must contain the development of individual powers, as a prior condition for all other goods.

— William Ernest Hocking

I find that a man is as old as his work. If his work keeps him from moving forward, he will look forward with the work.

— William Ernest Hocking