Boodin, John Elof
Boodin, John Elof
American philosopher born in Sweden in 1869 who emigrated in 1886 to the United States. Studied at the Universities of Colorado, Minnesota, Brown and especially Harvard under Royce with whom he kept a life-long friendship though he was opposed to his idealism. His works (Time and Reality, 1904 — Truth and Reality, 1912 — A Realistic Universe, 1916 — Cosmic Evolution, 1925 — Three Interpretations of the Universe, 1934 — God, 1935 — The Social Mind, 1940) form practically a complete system. His philosophy takes the form of a cosmic idealism, though he was interested for a time in certain aspects of pragmatism. It grew gradually from his early studies when he developed a new concept of a real and non-serial time. The structure of the cosmos is that of a hierarchy of fields, as exemplified in physics, in organisms, in consciousness and in society. The interpenetration of the mental fields makes possible human knowledge and social intercourse. Reality as such possesses five attributesbeing (the dynamic stuff of all complexes, the active energy), time (the ground of change and transformation), space (which accounts for extension), consciousness (active awareness which lights up reality in spots; it becomes the self when conative tendencies cooperate as one active group), and form (the ground of organization and structure which conditions selective direction). God is the spirit of the whole. — T.G.J