John Fiske, the American philosopher and advocate of evolutionary theory, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and baptized Edmund Fisk Green. He changed his name to John Fisk shortly after his mother remarried in 1855 (the e was added in 1860). He grew up in Middletown and attended the Congregational Church, but he became dissatisfied with orthodox Christianity and found himself drawn to the philosophical and theological implications of modern science. He early declared himself an "infidel," meaning by the word "non-Christian" rather than atheist. While he was a student at Harvard, he was punished by the college faculty for reading Auguste Comte in church.

Fiske's main philosophical work, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, developed from lectures given at Harvard in 1869 and 1871, and was completed in London during 1873 and 1874. In it he acknowledged himself a disciple and expositor of the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, the importance of which...