Lyell quarreled with the catastrophists, then, by no means because they assumed that catastrophes occur and have occurred, but because they had got into the habit of calling on their god Catastrophe to help them when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the wheel of observation of the present course of Nature, in order to help themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has become what it is chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts.
So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that can be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated more intensely or more rapidly at any time between the older Tertiary and the oldest Palæozoic epochs than they have done between the older Tertiary epoch and the present day. And if that is so, uniformitarianism, even as limited by Lyell,[1] has no call to lower its crest. But, if the facts were otherwise, the position Lyell took up remains impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of Nature were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now; what he did maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good evidence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet been shown to be incorrect.
I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the "Principles of Geology" in my young days; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was familiar with the truth that "the doctrine of uniformity is not incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown, is taught totidem verbis in that work. Even had it been possible for me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the "Principles," "Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar, must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound, author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly points out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of catastrophes.
- ↑ A great many years ago ("Presidential Address to the Geological Society," 1869) I ventured to indicate that which seemed to me to be the weak point, not in the fundamental principles of uniformitarianism, but in uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a less degree by Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded by the stratified rocks. I said: "This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things which are to the things which were this faithlessness to its own logic seems to me to have cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geological speculation which it might otherwise have held" ("Lay Sermons," p. 260). The context shows that "uniformitarianism" here means that doctrine, as limited in application by Hutton and Lyell, and that what I mean by "evolutionism" is consistent and thoroughgoing uniformitarianism.
him: "So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth-crust is quite consistent with the admission of their alternate development and suspension for indefinite periods within limited geographical areas" (p. 187).
