Borden Parker Bowne, an American Personalist philosopher, spent his scholarly life, that is, from 1876 to 1910, at Boston University, where he taught in the liberal arts college and the school of theology, and where he became the first dean of the graduate school. In many articles and in seventeen books, Bowne expounded his Personalism, or Personalistic Idealism, which held that the Creator-Person, God, and created persons constitute the real.

Bowne was constantly concerned with taking full account of every dimension of human experience, be it the logical, the emotional, the moral, or the religious. Each dimension should be given full value and not be arbitrarily explained away by pontifical claims made in the name of such doctrines as Christian supernaturalism, psychological associationism and materialism, or ethical utilitarianism. For Bowne, reason is the criterion of truth. This means that for him reasoning discovers the...