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Clarke (JOHN HESSIN an American jurist)

JOHN HESSIN, an American jurist, born at Lisbon, O., in 1857. He graduated from the Western Reserve University in 1877, and was admitted to the bar in the following year. After some general practice, he was employed as general counsel of several railroads.

He was appointed United States district judge for the Northern District of Ohio, from 1914 to 1916, when he became associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. with Leibnitz and Collins on the "Freedom of the Will," his Latin version of part of the "Iliad," and a considerable number of sermons.

His philosophic fame rests on his a priori argument for the existence of God, his theory of the nature and obligation of virtue as conformity to certain relations involved in the eternal fitness of things, and his opposition to Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, and others. He died in 1729.