William Ernest Hocking Quotations

William Ernest Hocking was an American Idealist philosopher.

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

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.
- The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience (1957), p. 5

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

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.
- Preface (20 May 1926), p. vii

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.
- Ch. I : What is Behind Us?, p. 1

Principle I : Legal rights are presumptive rights.
- Ch. VI : Presumptive Rights, p. 58

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."
- Ch. VI : Presumptive Rights, § 20, p. 58

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.
- Ch. VI : Presumptive Rights, § 24, p. 62

A presumption of equality may be contrary to present fact, and yet not contrary to a desideratum. We are not as a fact all equally fit to live, equally responsible, or equally deserving of the protection of the law: but it will hardly be doubted that it would be desirable if we were.
But further, the presumption of a desired condition is, in any group of plastic minds, a force tending to bring about the thing presumed, i.e., to create it. It aids a boy to reach maturity to treat him as if he were a little older than he is. A little older: for the presumption loses its effect if it is too wide of the actual fact. The fundamental presumptions of the law are justified on this basis and to this extent: if they are too wide of the truth to be creative, they are not justified.
- Ch. VI : Presumptive Rights, § 24, p. 63

Principle III : Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, p. 68

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.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 30, p. 68

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.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 32, p. 73

- Principle IV : There is one natural right and one only.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, p. 74

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.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 33, p. 74

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.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 33, p. 75

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.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 35, p. 76

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.
- Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 35, p. 77

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