  The term “personalism” made its world debut in Germany, where “der Personalismus” was first used by F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in his book Über die Religion in 1799. Amos Bronson Alcott seems to have been the first American to use the term, calling it in an 1863 essay “the doctrine that the ultimate reality of the world is a Divine Person who sustains the universe by a continuous act of creative will.” The term “American personalism” was coined by Walt Whitman (1819–1892) in his essay “Personalism,” which was published in The Galaxy in May 1868. In 1903 Charles Renouvier published Le Personnalisme, thereby introducing the word into the French as well. The word “personalism” first appeared as an encyclopedic entry in Volume IX of Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics in 1915 in an article by Ralph T. Flewelling.