Page 2 - Taking Leave News Today

This form of objection left the door ajar to the kind of “hybrid” interpretation favored by some in both Britain and America in the later Victorian period.

Darwin began casting around in his mind for supplementary theories, sometimes going so far as to reconsider evolutionary thinking he had once firmly rejected.

Notoriously, one of the shrewdest of Darwin’s “reticences” concerned the lack of fossil evidence.

A colleague remarked to me (in an uncharacteristically unscholarly disclosure) that he could not share my interest in “all this old 19th-century stuff.”

As is the case with the Biblical parables of Jesus, this one is entirely self-explanatory and needs no further comment from myself.

Charles Darwin himself exemplified the Argument from Pique, alluded to in past entries in this series, to a tee.

The threat which such thinking posed to theistic beliefs was not lost on the Roman Catholic Church when Pope Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council of 1869.

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.”