The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers

General Editor John R. Shook

The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers (DEAP) will be published by Continuum in 2010.
DEAP joins a growing series of impressive biographical dictionaries, including the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers.

Early American Philosophers are contributors to philosophical thought who lived in the territories of present-day U.S. and Canada from 1600 to 1860.

The list of names is available for potential contributors: this list is a Word document.

This site will be updated as authors are assigned. Reference works containing biographies for most of these figures are listed here. Authors are encouraged to choose a basket of figures from the same location: a university or the same state. For example, there are three figures from the University of Alabama.

Contributors can receive plenty of assistance with biography, research. and bibliography. If an entry is between 600 and 1000 words, the pay is $30. For entries between 1000 and 1,500 words (max), the pay is $50. This word count does not include the bibliography, which should include a major writings, the location of archived papers, and works about the figure.

The deadline is June 2010. An example of a good entry is provided here.

To receive an assignment, send an email to John Shook at jshook@pragmatism.org which looks like this:

Hi John,

I offer to write for DEAP on these figures:

Figure one, as a small entry
Figure two, as a medium entry
etc.

This is my contact information:

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HICKOK, Laurens Perseus (1798–1888)

Laurens Perseus Hickok was born on 29 December 1798 in Bethel, Connecticut, and died on 7 May 1888 in Amherst, Massachusetts. While still in high school, he opened and taught at a private school in Bethel. In 1818 he entered the junior class of Union College, graduating with a BA in 1820. He studied theology with mentors William Andrews of Danbury and Bennet Tyler of South Britain, Connecticut. Tyler was an “old school” Calvinist who later became the President of Dartmouth College. In 1822 Hickok married Elizabeth Taylor; they had no children. Hickok was ordained in 1824 at the church in Kent, Connecticut, where he served as pastor until 1829, when he was called to succeed Lyman Beecher in the pulpit of the Congregational church in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Hickok’s self education in theology and philosophy led in 1836 to his appointment as professor of theology at Western Reserve College in Ohio. In 1844 he became professor of theology at Auburn Theological Seminary. At Auburn, he published his first book, Rational Psychology; or, The Subjective Idea and the Objective Law of All Intelligence (1849). In 1852 he became professor of mental and moral philosophy and Vice President of Union College. At Union he published a number of important works. These included A System of Moral Science (1853); Empirical Psychology; or, The Human Mind as Given in Consciousness (1854); Rational Cosmology; or, The Eternal Principles and the Necessary Laws of the Universe (1858); and “Psychology and Skepticism” (1862) which written in response to a critical review of his revised Rational Psychology.

Hickok served as Acting President of Union College for several years before being confirmed as President in March 1866. He resigned from the presidency and his professorship in 1868, and moved to Amherst, Massachusetts where he continued to write and publish on theological subjects. With the collaboration of his nephew, Julius Hawley SEELYE, President of Amherst College, Hickok revised his books until his death in 1888.

The priority that Hickok assigned to rational over empirical psychology is evident in the order in which his books were written. The first, Rational Psychology, argued that an empirical psychology cannot go beyond a description of the facts of conscious experience and therefore needs a metaphysical, transcendental grounding to meet the criterion of a true science. Hickok recognized the domination of British empiricism in American thought, developed in Locke’s system as well in the philosophies of Berkeley, Hartley, and Hume (and, in opposition to Hume’s scepticism, the Scottish School of Common Sense). However, he believed Locke’s system to be only a partial philosophy of mind because Locke rejected a priori knowledge. Hickok welcomed Kant’s investigations into the origin and validity of all knowledge and his spur to the search for the general and universal a priori principles that govern what must be the facts of experience. The method for discovering these principles was the exercise of pure reason.

For Hickok, science entails identifying the correlation between the idea (subjective fact of experience) and the universal necessary law, identified through reason independent of experience. He devoted Book Two (around 600 pages) of his Rational Psychology to determining the a priori principles consistent with the facts of experience for Sense, Understanding, and Reason, the three faculties of the Intellect, where Intellect was in turn conceived as one of three modes in which the mind operates (the others being Sensibility, or Susceptibility, and Will). Intellect encompasses the mind’s capacity for knowing and is the source of all cognition.

A System of Moral Science, Hickok’s second book, followed the pattern set by the Rational Psychology. Rather than being concerned with detailing examples of moral conduct for students, Hickok concentrated instead on the delineation of the ultimate rational principle (“the intrinsic excellency of spiritual being” and a “spirit to act worthily of its spirituality”) that governs moral conduct within the spheres of personal duties to mankind in general and to civil, divine, and family government in particular. Civil government, he argued, exerts its authority through rewards and punishments, divine government through love and loyalty, and family government through a mixture of the two. All three constitute objective moral powers. In this text, Hickok demonstrated “his independence of current opinion by his outspoken treatment of the theory of the state, which was conceived in a Hegelian manner.” (Schneider 1946, p. 445)

Hickok’s Empirical Psychology elaborated the facts of mind as given in experience, tested by individual consciousness and the manifestations of collective consciousness in social and cultural phenomena such as language. Although Hickok gave pride of place to his Rational Psychology, it was his Empirical Psychology that had wide circulation as a textbook. Written in a style and with content accessible to students, it attained considerable popularity for use in courses in mental philosophy in the antebellum period and, in revised form, continued in use until the textbooks of the “new psychology” replaced the authors of the pre-Civil War era. A chapter on anthropology, in which Hickok discussed the mind-body relation and the influence of race, gender and temperament on mind, distinguished the Empirical Psychology from other texts of the pre-Darwinian era.

The description of mind and its processes provided by Hickok in the Empirical Psychology was generally consistent with that then being taught in American colleges under the influence of the Scottish Common Sense School despite differences between Hickok and the Scottish school in their respective metaphysics. For Hickok, the Intellect, the Sensibility or Susceptibility, and the Will are categories of mind that encompass the cognitive, conative, and volitional mental processes respectively. The Intellect operates through the three faculties of Sense, Understanding, and Reason, the primary subjects of his Rational Psychology. The Sense derives cognitions from the senses, identifying the quality and quantity of sensory experience. The Understanding connects the qualities and quantities provided by the senses into a conception (e.g., the smell and color that stimulate the senses may be understood as a flower); memories, concepts, associations, and other cognitive processes such as judgment are also considered part of the Understanding. Reason provided the mind with the capacity to determine how it perceives and thinks and is thus the means to arrive at a rational psychology.

The Susceptibility was considered in two aspects; animal susceptibility included irrational, emotional aspects of mind, feelings and desires, serving survival needs of the individual as well as social relationships, while rational susceptibility included a higher order of feelings or emotion related to aesthetics, ethics, science, and theism. Finally, the Will represents the mind’s capacity for making choices among alternatives, in the knowledge that an individual is held responsible for the choice that is made. Thus, for Hickok, the will is free.

In a concluding chapter of Rational Psychology entitled “The Competency of the Human Mind to Attain the End of Its Being,” Hickok addressed the end or purpose of the human mind which he believed to conform to the highest good of humanity. While the animal portion of mind seeks happiness, the spiritual portion seeks self-approval. The difficulty of achieving the higher spiritual ends lies in the hedonistic animal nature of mind; achieving spiritual fulfillment rested, Hickok concluded, with the coming of a savior. A contemporary reviewer of Hickok’s first three volumes (Rational Psychology, A System of Moral Science, and Empirical Psychology) believed them collectively to “represent the highest attainments in speculative thought which the American mind has yet reached.” (Anonymous 1859).

Hickok’s conviction that rational principles provide meaning for empirical facts was not restricted to his psychology. In his Rational Cosmology, he relied on reason as the instrumental human faculty to identify those general and universal principles for all sciences. As a philosopher-theologian, Hickok’s rational principles were consistent with the notion of a rational Author in which all facts of experience can be grounded. This was a position that he defended against attacks arguing that his philosophy was pantheistic, skeptical, and much too heavily influenced by German transcendental philosophy.

Hickok’s psychology was a serious attempt to provide a theory of mind that rested on a solid metaphysical foundation. His approach offered an alternative to the empirical psychologies that constituted the British tradition in American mental philosophy and foreshadowed the later tension within later scientific psychology between an emphasis on empirical fact-gathering and the pursuit of theoretical principles within which the facts may be understood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rational Psychology; or, The Subjective Idea and the Objective Law of All Intelligence (Auburn, N.Y., 1849; 2nd edn, New York and Chicago, 1861).
A System of Moral Science (Schenectady, N.Y., 1853).
Empirical Psychology; or, The Human Mind as Given in Consciousness (Schenectady, N.Y., 1854).
Rational Cosmology; or, The Eternal Principles and the Necessary Laws of the Universe (New York, 1858).
Creator and Creation; or, The Knowledge in the Reason of God and His Work (Boston, 1872).
Humanity Immortal; or, Man Tried, Fallen and Redeemed (Boston, 1872; 2nd edn 1876).
The Logic of Reason, Universal and Eternal (Boston, 1875).

Other Relevant Works
Hickok’s papers are at Amherst College.
“Psychology and Scepticism,” American Theological Review 15 (1862): 391–414.

Further Reading
Amer Nat Bio, Appleton’s Cycl Amer Bio, Cambridge Dict Amer Bio, Dict Amer Bio, Nat Cycl Amer Bio v7
Anonymous. “Dr. Hickok’s Philosophy,” The Bibliotheca Sacra and Biblical Repository 16 (1859): 253–78.
Bare, John K. “Laurens Perseus Hickok: Philosopher, Theologian, and Psychologist,” in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, vol. 3, eds. G.A. Kimble and M. Wertheimer (Washington, D.C., 1998), pp. 1–15.
Fay, Jay Wharton. American Psychology before William James (New Brunswick, N.J., 1939).
Good, James A. “Introduction,” to Rational Psychology, by Laurens Perseus Hickok, vol. 4 of The Early American Reception of German Idealism, ed. James A. Good (Bristol, UK, 2002), pp. v-xviii.
Roback, A.A. History of American Psychology (New York, 1952).

Alfred H. Fuchs
Bowdoin College