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Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) provides the closest chronological fit with Darwin.

Of immediate relevance to Darwin’s generation were writers who can be traced in a fairly direct line from the beginning of the 19th century.

As Alec Ryrie pointed out in his history of Doubt, “intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it.”

Fleeming Jenkin (the distinguished Scottish scientist who with Lord Kelvin spearheaded the laying of the transatlantic cable) was particularly scathing.

People chose to believe what they wanted to believe in obedience to the then reigning intellectual fashion.

Charles Darwin, as we saw yesterday, pulled off an intellectual coup against the major thinkers of the Western tradition. How did he do it?

The classical pantheon, lacking moral credibility, had become a source of embarrassment to thoughtful Greeks.

Darwinism, when viewed from a philosophical perspective, might more accurately be understood as a late sub-branch of ancient speculative thought.

What distinguished thinkers had long called out for its manifest absurdity was now, Phoenix-like, rising from the ashes.

Bottom line: Darwin did not have a single scrap of empirical fieldwork to document his conjectures.