George Holmes Howison: "The City of God" and Personal Idealism

Abstract

American Personalism is sometimes referred to as having East and West Coast varieties: Boston Personalism, founded by Bordan Parker Bowne and carried on by Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Peter Bertocci, and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others, and California Personalism, founded by George Holmes and carried on by Ralph Tyler Flewelling.1 But like so many shorthand notions it doesn't quite work. No one really carried on Howison's multi-personalitarian ism. created a radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, who was no more the ultimate monarch, no longer the only ruler and creator of the universe, but the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. It is no wonder found no disciples among the religious, for whom his thought was heretical, or the non-religious, who thought his proposals too religious; only McTaggart's idealist atheism or Thomas Davidson's Apeirionism seem to resemble Howisons personal idealism. By all accounts George Holmes was one of the great philosophical teachers of his age. He helped create the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley, started the Library with the gift of his books, and participated in one of the great philosophical debates of his age. But himself believed he had discovered a great truth and preached it. Ralph Tyler Flewelling called him a Prophet of Freedom (1957, 5). His biographers John Wright Buckham and George Malcolm Stratton, who compiled a selection of his articles, described him as an Old Testament prophet. William Ernest Hocking, who had been a younger colleague of at Berkeley, said Howison comes as near to Elijah the prophet, and in some ways to Simon Peter, as any human being I expect to meet in my time (quoted in Buckham and Stratton 1936, 13). This prophet label captures two aspects of Howison's life and character: his absolute belief in the person and, like Abraham, his wanderings from St. Louis to Boston, and to Germany, his one year appointments, and work as a philosophical tutor, until finally settling in California while discovering and securing a place to preach his doctrine. For Howison, personal idealism was more than a philosophical posi tion, it was the Truth. But he created no school and had no disciples. This was a