Hickok

by Jack McCall. He is buried in Mount Moriah
Cemetery, Deadwood.

[Material in private collection of author is the prin-
cipal source. G. A. Custer, Wild Life on the Plains
(1874), E. B. Custer, Tenting on the Plains (1887) and
Following the Guidon (1890) are reliable, but J. W.
Buel, Heroes of the Plains (1882), and Frank J. Wil-
stach, Wild Bill Hickok (1926) contain errors. G. W.
Nichols' article in Harpers' New Monthly Mag., Feb.
1867, is good except for the account of the fight at Rock
Creek Station, which Hickok repudiated as soon as he
read it, saying he never told Nichols that story. See
also Kan. State Hist. Soc. Colls., vol. XVII (1928);
Stuart Henry, Conquering our Great Am. Plains
(1930); and W. E. Eisele, The Real "Wild Bill" Hickok
(1931), an impressionistic account which states that he
married Mrs. Agnes Lake Thatcher.] W E. C

HICKOK, LAURENS PERSEUS (Dec. 29,
1798-May 6, 1888), clergyman, philosopher, was
born in Bethel, Conn., the son of Ebenezer
and Polly (Benedict) Hickok. He graduated at
Union College in 1820; studied theology under
Rev. William Andrews of Danbury and Rev.
Bennet Tyler \_q.v."\] was married on Oct. 9,
1822, to Elizabeth Benedict Taylor of Kent,
Conn.; and was ordained and installed as pastor
at Kent on Dec. 10,1823. There he remained for
six years. At one time during his pastorate for-
mal charges were brought of "unministerial con-
duct, such as whistling, vaulting fences, running
on the streets, and driving a fast horse" (Francis
Atwater, History of Kent, Conn., 1897, p. 52),
but the case against him was dismissed by the
Consociation. On July 15, 1829, he became pas-
tor of the church at Litchfield, Conn., where he
remained until 1836. He was professor of Chris-
tian theology in Western Reserve College, 1836-
44, and in Auburn Theological Seminary, 1844-
52. In the latter year he went to Union College
as vice-president and professor of mental and
moral philosophy. In 1856 he acted as moderator
in the new-school Presbyterian General Assem-
bly. During the declining years of President
Nott of Union, Hickok carried most of the actual
duties of the presidency, succeeding to the office
in 1866. He resigned in 1868 to devote himself
to his literary labors and passed the rest of his
life in retirement at Amherst, Mass. He was a
man of stalwart frame, massive head, robust
health, and indomitable energy. Besides pub-
lished sermons and addresses, he was the author
of Rational Psychology (1849), A System of
Moral Science (1853), Empirical Psychology
(1854; rev. ed. 1882), Creator and Creation
(1872), Rational Cosmology (1858), Humanity
Immortal (1872), The Logic of Reason (1875).
As a philosopher Hickok was unquestionably
the ablest American dialectician of his day. Com-
mitted by his training to a defense of the Chris-
tian theology, he undertook this in no parochial
spirit but was determined to base his theology

Hickok
on the firmest and broadest of rational founda-
tions. "How much more rapidly," he wrote,
"may the knowledge and worship of the true God
spread, when philosophy herself shall become
converted to, and baptized in, a Gospel theism!"
(Rational Cosmology, p. 53), To the task of con-
verting modern philosophy to theism he brought
a keen and subtle intellect, scornful of any aid
from mysticism, confident in the power of rea-
son to advance by serried arguments to the con-
quest of absolute knowledge. The terms of his
problem were set for him by Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason, whose significance he understood
better than did his theological contemporaries.
He saw the folly of reverting, like McCosh, Por-
ter, and Hopkins, to the pre-Kantian position of
naive realism; advance along the lines of the
German idealists would lead to pantheism; while
to remain within the negative conclusions of the
first Critique itself would be to accept a still more
abhorrent skepticism. In his earliest and most
important work, Rational Psychology, which was
the first profound treatment of epistemology that
had come from any American pen since Jonathan
Edwards, Hickok analyzed the entire process of
knowledge, endeavoring to reach a priori prin-
ciples free from the subjectivity of the Kantian
categories. The resultant philosophy, which he
called "Constructive Realism," stressed the "con-
structive" powers of the mind so far that the
"realism" was seriously endangered. Accepting
the current distinction between the faculties of
the sensibility, understanding, and reason, he
credited the reason with an intuitive insight of
"comprehension" altogether different from the
discursive procedure of the understanding. In
the light of reason thus conceived, he argued for
the being of God and the individual soul as su-
pernatural forces: the existence of nature as a
whole could only be explained as the creation of
a power not itself a part of nature; knowledge
of phenomena as phenomena could only be valid
for a knower who is not himself a phenomenon.
In his System of Moral Science Hickok applied
the same principles to the field of ethics and ar-
gued that the facts of the moral life require and
demonstrate the reality of the individual soul as
a free agent His ethical views were rigoristic
and largely Kantian. In his Rational Cosmology
he expounded the a priori principles according to
which the universe must have been created and
also showed with much ingenuity that as a mat-
ter of scientific fact it was actually created as it
must have been. In this excursion into physics
he came dangerously near to falling into the maw
of pantheism, always gaping uncomfortably near
his theism.