  Boston University was long considered the hub of American personalism, under the auspices of philosophy professor Borden Parker Bowne.  Bowne was a Methodist minister who had studied under Rudolf Hermann Lotze in Germany. Lotze, a student of the speculative theist Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–66) who assimilated much of the later Schelling’s criticism of Hegel, sought, like the speculative theists, to modify Hegelian idealism by maintaining that the real is always concrete and individual, transforming Hegel’s absolute idealism into a personal idealism. Adding elements also from recent trends in psychology, Bowne developed a distinct and explicitly personalist position, which assumed the character of a philosophical school. His late book Personalism, published in 1908, is a popular summary of his philosophy which introduced the term ‘personalism’ into American philosophical and theological discourse.