Phil, as his four brothers and only sister called him. He was the eldest of his father’s children. His mother died in childbirth. His father married his wife’s sister, by whom the other children were born. Phil was thus a half brother, so to say. He was an exemplary student, more ambitious intellectually than his siblings. He was destined to be a scholar. After completing his undergraduate and graduate studies in Literature and Philosophy at Harvard, his father sent him abroad to England, France and finally Germany to further his studies in Philosophy.In the Preface to his one published book THE X OF PSYCHOLOGY (Harvard UP, 1940) he paid homage to those teachers, ancient and modern, who formed his outlook on Philosophy and Psychology. He lists first Plato, Descartes and Kant as major influences upon him, to a lesser degree Aristotle, Leibniz and Hume. In Marburg he studied with Cohen and Natorp, the two major disciples of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. (He married Natorp’s daughter Gertrud, 18 years his younger. He returned with her to a seemingly well conceived life in Boston.Once there he would father four children, the last dying a crib death. This information is of another order than Philosophy and outside the purview of this brief sketch.) He studied in Paris with Henri Bergson, who is often cited by modern Existentialists as influencing them back via Aristotle, to Aquinas, and away from Hume, Kant and Hegel toward either fellow Vitalist Nietzsche or as in the case of Maritain and Marcel to Catholicism. Obviously Phil was not inclined toward the religious pathology of a forerunner of Existentialism such as Kierkegaard. Louis Massignon, in a 1923 letter to his friend and philosopher Gabriel Marcel, referred to the world view of Kant as “kantocentrism” with Descartes thrown in as a self “aesthetically myopic”. Phil remained steadfastly with his choices who were hesitant to wander far into metaphysics beyond the Platonist theory of Ideas including of The Good. He noted the company of his Harvard professors in the early 1900s: Santayana, James, Royce, Munsterberg, among a host of other academic philosophers in America and abroad. He left out mention of three major loves of his life in literature far from academic philosophy, but not unphilosophical: the Indian Upanishads, the poetry of Rabinandrath Tagore, and Goethe’s Faust. From these above all , especially in the years after he lost his sight, he spoke to his students at Bowdoin College from a flawless memory as being transmitters of Light.HWM