Bowne was an American philosopher and theologian heavily influenced by Ger-man writers, especially HerGer-mann Lotze. In fact, Strong once called Bowne “the best expositor of Lotze’s system.”48 Bowne was ordained in 1867, about the time
he began his undergraduate studies. After studying at New York University, Bowne was invited to become professor of philosophy at Boston University in 1876, where he would remain for more than thirty years. As his reputation grew, Bowne received offers from other schools, including Yale and the newly founded University of Chicago, yet he remained in Boston, where he served as both pro-fessor and dean of the graduate school until retiring shortly before his death.
Early in his career Bowne described his philosophy as transcendental em-piricism, which appears to acknowledge Kant’s impact on his own thought.
In a posthumously published work based on his lectures at Boston University, Bowne explained what he meant by transcendental empiricism: “It is transcen-dental as going beyond the empiricism of sense impressions, but it is empiricism as limiting knowledge to the field of experience. The true view then is neither empiricism nor rationalism of the old type, but criticism which unites and rec-onciles them”49 Such terminology accurately described Bowne’s early thinking, and he never completely abandoned it, but he eventually decided to call his system personal idealism or simply personalism.50 This change of terminology reflected both the evolution of Bowne’s philosophical position over time and his self-conscious staking out of new philosophical ground. As one biographer put it, Bowne avowed “that as a personalist he was the first of the clan in any thoroughgoing sense.”51
Gary Dorrien has summarized the major themes of Bowne’s philosophi-cal personalism as “epistemologiphilosophi-cally dualistic, metaphysiphilosophi-cally pluralistic, and ethical in orientation.” This last phrase is significant, for the ethical thrust of Bowne’s system made it attractive to many who were not overly concerned about parsing the finer points of his philosophy. Bowne himself was interested in pre-serving the ethical aspect of Christianity regardless of what might become of its actual theology, and his attempt to do so met with a ready audience. Bowne was a Wesleyan by background, but he was well respected by theological liberals and by many who embraced a social Christianity regardless of their denomina-tional identification. As Dorrien has pointed out, “Virtually all liberal Protes-tant thinkers of his generation looked to him for intellectual leadership.”52 Like many theological liberals of his day, Strong seems to have thought very highly of Bowne, though he of course was interested in the details of Bowne’s philo-sophical system.
Unlike most of the other philosophers mentioned above, Bowne and Strong were contemporaries. Bowne taught at Boston University during the 1880s and 1890s while Strong was teaching in Rochester, and Bowne wrote most of his books during the years when Strong was writing and revising his own works.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Strong’s use of Bowne’s writings increased significantly between the first and final editions of his Systematic Theology.
In the first edition of his theology, Strong cited Bowne’s works about six-teen times, nearly all from either Bowne’s examination of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy or his recently published book on metaphysics.53 At this relatively early stage in his career at Rochester, Strong was somewhat critical of Bowne. In fact, he found in Bowne a tendency toward pantheism, and he took issue with this. For example, Strong wrote, “To deny second causes is essential idealism, and tends to pantheism. This tendency we find in the recent Metaphysics of Bowne, who regards only personality as real.”54 For Strong, this was Bowne’s great weakness as a philosopher. Whether Bowne changed, Strong changed, or, more likely, both did, by the final edition of Strong’s Systematic Theology in 1907 his use of Bowne had greatly increased and his opinion improved sig-nificantly, with references to at least nine of Bowne’s books. Many of these had been written during the intervening years between the first and final editions of Strong’s Systematic Theology, but more important, Strong no longer accused Bowne of having pantheistic tendencies and in fact altered the section where he had made such an accusation. He still viewed Bowne as an objective idealist, but now he stated, “This idealism of Bowne is not pantheism, for it holds that, while there are no second causes in nature, man is a second cause, with a per-sonality distinct from that of God, and lifted above nature by his powers of free will.”55 Strong himself had not become a Boston personalist, but his concept of ethical monism bore an important similarity to his new description of Bowne’s personalist idealism. Like Bowne, Strong sought to avoid pantheism by empha-sizing that human personalities are distinct from the divine personality, and both argued that the reality of such personalities provides the basis for genuine ethical responsibility.
Strong’s change of opinion about Bowne’s philosophy first appeared in the fifth edition of his Systematic Theology. As late as the fourth edition (1893) Strong was still accusing Bowne of having pantheistic tendencies, but in the fifth edi-tion (1896) Strong suddenly removed this accusaedi-tion and instead inserted the claim that Bowne’s objective idealism was not to be confused with pantheism.56 The fifth edition was also the first edition of Strong’s Systematic Theology to con-tain his newly developed concept of ethical monism.
Strong never embraced Bowne’s personal idealism, but Strong’s opinion about Bowne’s relationship to pantheism appears to have changed at about the same time he developed the concept of ethical monism, timing that appears concep-tually driven rather than mere coincidence.