At the end of the nineteenth century, Darwinism troubled Canadian idealists grievously, for, from an empirical point of view, such scientific discoveries clearly held much truth, and yet they fell so far short of providing a complete and satisfying world picture that they could not by themselves command belief. Wilfred Campbell responded publicly to the controversy surrounding evolution and Darwinism by writing poems touching on the subject of humankind's origin, but privately his response was so much more elaborate that it must have amounted to an obsession: he wrote a twenty-two chapter monograph called "The Tragedy of Man." This treatise describes the process by which humanity received its spiritual nature and the repercussions of this theory in all aspects of human life, both individual and collective.
