A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists/Allen, Charles Grant Blairfindie
Allen, Charles Grant Blairfindie, B.A., writer. B. (Canada) Feb. 24, 1848. Grant Allen was the son of a minister of the Irish Church who had emigrated to Canada. He was educated at first by his father, then by a tutor from Yale. In 1862 he was sent to Europe, and studied, successively, at the College Imperial of Dieppe, the King Edward's School at Birmingham, and Oxford University (Merton). From 1873 to 1876 he was professor of mental and moral philosophy in a college for the blacks at Spanish Town, Jamaica, where he developed his Agnostic and other radical views of life. On his return to England he devoted himself to journalism and letters. His Physiological Æsthetics (1877), which he dedicated to Herbert Spencer, won for him considerable regard among students of science and philosophy, and he sustained this by his Vignettes from Nature (1881), The Evolutionist at Large (1881) The Colours of Flowers (1882), Colin Clout's Calendar (1883), and The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897). He was greatly esteemed by Huxley and Darwin, and his refined character and wealth of culture endeared him to all the advanced thinkers of his day. After 1883 he wrote a number of novels and guide books, and published some verse. His Agnosticism is best seen in a posthumous collection of essays (The Hand of God, 1909) published by the R. P. A. D. Oct. 28, 1899.