BENTHAM TO NIETZSCHE philosophy; but no history of philosophy can omit to mention Darwin, because of the implications of his biological work on philosophy of religion and on general metaphysics.4 John Henry Newman Though Darwin’s ideas met with opposition in some ecclesiastical circles, they were accepted with equanimity by the greatest religious writer of the Victorian age, John Henry Newman Shortly after the appearance of On the Origin of Species Newman observed that if one were to believe in the separate creation of each species one would also have to believe in the creation of fossil-bearing rocks ‘There is as much want of simplicity in the creation of distinct species’, he wrote, ‘as in those of the creation of trees in full growth or of rocks with fossils in them I mean that it is as strange that monkeys should be so like men, with no historical connexion between them, as that there should be no history or course of facts by which fossil bones got into the rocks.’5 He was quite prepared ‘to go the whole hog with Darwin’ and he took no part in any controversy between science and religion His claim to a place in the history of philosophy lies elsewhere Newman was born in London in 1801, and was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford, from 1817 to 1820, and a Fellow of Oriel between 1822 and 1845 In 1828 he became Vicar of St Mary’s, the university church, and acquired a lasting fame as a preacher After an evangelical upbringing he became convinced, over the years, of the truth of the Catholic interpretation of Christianity He was one of the founders of the ‘Oxford Movement’, which sought to have this interpretation accepted as authoritative within the Church of England In 1845, however, he converted to Roman Catholicism and resigned his Oriel fellowship As a Roman Catholic priest he founded an oratory, or community of parochial priests, in Birmingham, where he was based for most of the rest of his life In 1850 he was appointed the first Rector of a new Catholic university in Dublin, a post which he held until 1858 The lectures and addresses which he gave in that capacity became The Idea of a University, which when published became a classic of the theory of education These implications are discussed in Chs and 12 Quoted by David Brown, Newman: A Man for our Time (London: SPCK, 1990), 28