 Coolidge attended Black River Academy and then Amherst College, where he distinguished himself in the debating class, as a senior joined the fraternity Phi Gamma Delta and graduated cum laude. While there, Coolidge was profoundly influenced by philosophy professor Charles Edward Garman, a Congregational mystic, with a neo-Hegelian philosophy. Garman ignited in Coolidge a manly self-respect, and inspired him with a belief in God as a cosmic conscious, greater than the human, which represented "the way, the truth and the life."
