* This is the latest installment of “Problematica.” Like so many others, it discusses Charles Lyell. In particular, it revisits some s*** Max said in the appendix of an earlier post on the “worldviews” of Charles Lyell and Eduard Suess. (No need to have read that post; I review all relevant s*** herein.) Problematica is written by Max Dresow…
I just can’t quit you, Charles Lyell.
Yes, I’m writing about Lyell again. (I know, shut up.) Also: I’m not sorry. Just a little self-conscious. Anyway, I’ll try to keep this short.
Last year I wrote a three-part essay on Charles Lyell and Eduard Suess. The idea wasn’t to say anything novel about Lyell. It was rather to highlight what a remarkable scientist Suess was, and to position him as Lyell’s equal in theoretical geology— someone who both built upon and critiqued Lyell’s work in a way that shaped several generations of geological thinking. Ultimately, my goal was to destabilize the idea that nineteenth century geology was somehow embodied in Lyell’s Principles. The Principles was a big deal, but it wasn’t the last word in nineteenth century geology. Das Antlitz der Erde was the last word in nineteenth century geology, and its author was arguably a more accomplished geologist than even Sir Charles. HPS people take note!
The second volume of Lyell’s Principles, photographed with a hunk of Galapagos basalt
Anyway, here I am, impervious to my own message, talking about Lyell again. Why? Because I just reread Principles and, in doing this, developed doubts about some things I said. One thing especially, which is that Lyell’s Principles is best read as a partisan statement on behalf of a steady-state geotheory. As I put it in that essay:
the key to understanding Principles resides in the claim that the earth does not undergo ‘any abrupt transitions or directional changes’; on Lyell’s earth, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Of course, none of this is original. As I said in an appendix to that essay (lightly edited to enhance readability):
This is an old idea. As Martin Rudwick argued in 1970, Principles is best interpreted as an argument for a steady state geotheory; “one long argument,” as Darwin later said of his own book. The strongest piece of evidence in favor of this interpretation is a letter Lyell wrote to Murchison, in which Lyell disclosed that he intended to establish the “principles of reasoning” in geology, indicating that this will “[strengthen] the system necessarily arising out of [it].” (These principles were that (1) “no causes whatever have from the earliest time… to the present, ever acted, but those now acting,” and (2) “they never acted with different degrees of energy from that which they now exert.”) But, Rudwick insisted, it was the system that was the soul of the work— “the most fundamental object of the [Principles] was to establish… a non-directional, steady-state theory of earth, in opposition to theories involving directional changes either in the earth itself or in the forms of life on earth” (Rudwick 1970, 8).* To corroborate this claim, Rudwick engaged in a subtle analysis of the text, which led him to conclude that “the structure of the Principles is so carefully designed, both in outline and in detail, in the service of a sustained persuasive argument that it fully deserves the term ‘strategy.’”
[* Stephen Jay Gould supported this interpretation. In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, he called Principles “a brief for a world view— time’s stately [and non-directional] cycle as the incarnation of rationality” (Gould 1987, 143). “We can… recover Lyell’s vision by grasping the Principles as an argument… dedicated to defending this vision [a steady state geotheory] in the face of a geological record that requires close interpretation… to yield its secret.”]
Rudwick’s interpretation ruffled many feathers— witness the response of my fellow Minnesotan (and Lyell stan) Leonard Wilson, whose annoyance at Rudwick practically drips from the page (Wilson 1980). Today, though, it is almost a commonplace among people who care about this stuff. I say “almost” because, as I noted in my earlier post, some historians have sounded a note of caution. First among them is Cambridge heavyweight James Secord. The appendix again:
Yes, Lyell was interested in resisting “some of the best-supported generalizations of contemporary geology,” Secord observes. But for all his provocations, “the substantive claims in the Principles were models of philosophical caution” (Secord 2014, 149). The point needs to be stressed, because Lyell’s imaginative statements “about the pattern of earth history are often taken out of context, interpreted in terms of private letters and journals so that their function as thought-experiments about the past is obscured” (150). Interpretations like Rudwick’s threaten to make Principles into “a cosmological book, which points towards the construction of a connected narrative history of the world.” (Think of a narrative that begins with a swirling nebula and ends with the creation of Homo sapiens.) “However, in his public statements during the 1830s Lyell no more advocated a steady-state, cyclical, or non-progressionist cosmology than he did progression itself” (Secord 2014, 151). “Indeed, the Principles claimed that any kind of global narrative would prove impossible to reconstruct, because too much of the record had been lost. Lyell was not [as Gould claimed] the ‘historian of time’s cycle’” (emphasis added).
If Lyell was not in the business of constructing a “cosmology” or connected narrative history of the world, then what was he up to? According to Secord, the answer is: placing the foundations of geology on firm philosophical foundations, and so rendering the science acceptable to an audience of affluent and politically conservative readers. Here the key was the vera causa principle, introduced by Isaac Newton and later explicated by Enlightenment philosophers like Thomas Reid. This held that, in order for something to be a “real” cause, it ought to (1) “have a real existence, and not [be] barely conjectured to exist without proof,” and (2) “be sufficient to produce the effect” (Reid 1785). Applying this to geology, Lyell concluded, first, that geologists should admit into geological explanations only those causes that have been observed to operate, and second, that geologists should limit themselves to causes whose effects can be directly ascertained (since only in this case will it be possible to determine whether a cause is adequate to produce an effect). Or, as Lyell put it in that letter to Murchison, quoted above:
“[My book] will endeavour to establish the principle[s] of reasoning in ... [geology]… [which are] that no causes whatever have from the earliest time to which we can look back, to the present, ever acted, but those now acting; and that they never acted with different degrees of energy from that which they now exert.
Seen in this way, Lyell’s core geological commitments were not theoretical, but methodological— indeed, one might even call them “philosophical.” In Secord’s words: “uniformity was not a theory about the actual history of nature, but a policy for securing the philosophical foundations of geology” (Secord 1997, ix, emphasis added).*
[* If this seems straightforward, it’s worth noting that Lyell’s application of the vera causa principle was anything but. After all, if we able to confirm that a presently acting cause is adequate to produce an effect— that an earthquake is capable of permanently changing the level of the land, say— then surely we can infer that a more powerful cause could have produced the same, or even a more extreme, effect. But no. According to Lyell, “[a] force of much greater intensity would not necessarily produce a similar effect” (Laudan 1987, 206). So we must assume that geological agencies have never acted with different degrees of energy from that which they presently exert. This is an awkward, possibly even a perverse, application of the vera causa principle, which is why some commenters have regarded it as a bit of geological legerdemain.]
So, was Principles “a brief for a world view,” (Rudwick, Gould) or a methodological intervention intended to show that one should reason as if the Earth has always looked and behaved in about the same way (Secord)? Appendix:
My sympathies lie with the first reading, not least because many parts of the text seem to function as explicit arguments for non-directionalism. For example, the “amphibious being” section amounts to a claim that restorative and destructive forces are finely-balanced. Certainly these remarks are not meant to suggest that balance is a mere conceptual possibility. Likewise, the “dusky sprite” is there to suggest that geologists only infer a directional geohistory because they are fixated on a subset of the total evidence. The correct view, Lyell implies, is not agnosticism, but skepticism about directionality. Hence, it is hard to interpret these sections (or indeed large parts of volume one) as anything but arguments for non-directionalism.
Martin Rudwick (left) and James Secord (right)
Now, these remarks are not totally off-base. Lyell’s book does contain a whole series of arguments against directionalism (which no one has ever thought to deny). In addition, Lyell goes beyond these criticisms to offer a positive view of the earth and its history (more controversial, but still widely accepted). So what’s the issue?
The issue is that my remarks missed the target entirely as an attempted intervention in the Rudwick-Secord dispute. For one thing, I mischaracterized Secord’s position. He does not argue (as I said) that Lyell’s Principles was “an exercise aiming to show that one should be open to the possibility that the Earth has always looked and behaved about the same way.” Instead, his claim was that Principles was (among other things) an attempted methodological intervention that aimed “to make geology into an inductive science grounded in the observation of causes.” Put in these terms, there is no obvious tension between Rudwick’s position and Secord’s.
Yet there is a tension, which I failed to identify. Secord, in the quoted remarks, made a valid criticism of Rudwick. Yet he also committed a misstep of his own, or at least failed to handle the Rudwickian interpretation very charitably. All of which makes it difficult to say who got the better of the other. There are problems with the Rudwickian interpretation, but they are not necessarily the problems Secord latches onto. Likewise, Secord’s interpretation— while generally excellent— seems not to know what to make of Lyell-the-system builder, or at least declines to say much about his theoretical aims. How, then, should we sort this out?
Begin with Rudwick’s error. As I’ve said, Rudwick argues that “the most fundamental object of the [Principles] was to establish… a non-directional, steady-state theory of earth, in opposition to theories involving directional changes either in the earth itself or in the forms of life on earth” (Rudwick 1970, 8). Rudwick does not deny “that there were many other concerns that impinged upon his work.” Still, while
“[the] Principles certainly demonstrates his concern for the separation of geological research from the interpretation of Scripture; his interest in finding naturalistic explanations for even the most puzzling geological phenomena; his emphasis on the adequacy of observable geological processes in the interpretation of those phenomena; and, not least, his acute perception of the immensity of geological time and of the fragmentary nature of the geological record. Yet all these areas of emphasis are used in the strategy of the Principles, not as arguments of interest in themselves, but as tactical devices to be deployed in the service of a uniformitarian system of earth history” (Rudwick 1970, 32)*
Needless to say, Secord disagrees with this. The most fundamental object of Lyell’s Principles was not to establish a steady-state geotheory. Indeed, in Secord’s analysis, Lyell’s theoretical aims are none too clear. He admits that “Lyell’s most obvious philosophical debt was to Scottish traditions of theorizing about the earth,” and especially to John Playfair, who “brought the Enlightenment philosopher James Hutton’s system of the earth into the mainstream of nineteenth-century debate, recasting it in inductive, empiricist terms acceptable to the post-Enlightenment era” (Secord 1997, xxi). But elsewhere he is careful to say that Lyell does not advocate a cyclical theory of earth history, as Hutton had. The reader is left wondering if Principles had any substantive theoretical aims at all.
[* Here, I think, Rudwick pushes his argument too far. As far as I can tell, there’s no good reason to regard Lyell’s theoretical aim as a master aim of the book. One might just as well argue that Lyell’s principal aim was to turn geology into a proper inductive science. Or, what comes to the same thing, to make geology respectable to “a conservative and respectable readership” (Secord 1997, xiv). The mere fact that one can discern a “strategy” in the organizational structure of the text does not mean that Lyell’s fundamental aim was geotheoretical.]
The frontispiece to Lyell’s Elements of Geology, meant to illustrate a theoretical claim: “the contemporaneous origin of the four great classes of rocks”
Still, this is not the error I had in mind. Rudwick’s error was more of a blunder: it was the error of reading into certain of Lyell’s statements more than he should have. For instance, Rudwick seems to say that Lyell was publicly committed to certain adventurous claims, like the claim made in a letter to Murchison that “all [the] changes [recorded in the geological record] are to happen in the future again, & iguanodons & their congeners must as assuredly live again in the latitude of Cuckfield” (quoted in Rudwick 2008, 307, emphases added). But if Lyell was privately convinced that geohistory is measured out in cycles, in print he was more circumspect:
Then might those genera [roughly, kinds] of animals return, of which the memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continent. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the peterodactyle might flit again through the umbrageous groves of tree-ferns. Coral reefs might be prolonged beyond the arctic circle, where the whale and the narwhal now abound. Turtles might deposit their eggs in the sand of the sea beach, where now the walrus sleeps, and where the seal is drifted on the ice flow… (Lyell 1830, 123, emphases mine)*
In Worlds Before Adam, Rudwick declares that the indented quotation “repeat[s] and amplifie[s] his claim in public”— that is, the claim he made privately to Murchison (Rudwick 2008, 307). But this is false. In presenting it publicly, the claim is hedged about with qualifications, so that it functions rather as an imaginative suggestion than a secular prophesy. Rudwick detects beneath these “mights” a hidden confidence. Secord insists that we take Lyell’s statement at face value.
I think Secord is right to criticize Rudwick on this point. Officially— in print— Lyell is committed to no “cosmological” claims about the cycling of the “great year.” He is merely “indulg[ing]… speculations”— albeit speculations that “may perhaps approximate to a true theory” (Lyell 1830, 123, 105). Lyell was not the historian of time’s cycle, even if he may have been its impish theorist. Private beliefs do not give the content of public statements.
“Awful Changes,” Henry De la Beche’s cartoon mocking Lyell’s remarks about the cycling of the “great year”
Yet there is something fishy about Secord’s interpretation too. Secord writes as if one of two things must be the case. Either Lyell was engaged in a project of speculative cosmologizing in the vein of a Buffon or a Humphrey Davy, or he was practicing good epistemological caution— offering thought experiments for contemplation as opposed to substantive claims about the earth. But these are not the only options. Lyell could have been practicing epistemological caution about his most outrageous claims (that iguanodon business, for example), while at the same time defending a theoretical picture of the earth with implications for the pattern of geohistory. And as far as I can see, this is exactly what he was doing. If I’m right about this, then Lyell’s critics were right to find in Principles a “doctrine”— a set of commitments that, when added together, amounted to a theory. It wasn’t a “connected narrative history of the world,” as Secord rightly says. But it was a theory that implied that the historical record was going to look a certain way: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Here, Rudwick is on solid footing. Nowhere does he argue that Lyell’s Principles is a “cosmological book,” or that it offers a connected narrative history of the world. (I’m not even sure that Rudwick would say that Lyell endorsed a cyclical geotheory, although Gould certainly would.) Rather, Rudwick’s claim is that Lyell intended his interpretation of earth history to be “an explanation as comprehensive as the directionalist synthesis it was designed to supplant.”* And this is entirely plausible.
[* The “directionalist synthesis” is the name Rudwick gives to a set of ideas, popular around 1830, which included the notion that the earth is slowly cooling from an incandescent state. This was thought to provide an explanation of the supposedly progressive pattern evidenced in the fossil record: as the earth slowly cooled, different kinds of plants and animals were made to keep pace with changing conditions at the surface. It was also thought to explain certain structural features of the earth’s crust, since a cooling earth might be expected to produce folded mountains as it contracts.]
What were the components of Lyell’s non-directionalist synthesis? Here is a short, and no doubt highly incomplete, list:
The history of the earth is continuous; there are no sharp breaks in geohistory serving to demarcate successive geological periods;
The extinction of species is a piecemeal process; floras and faunas are not destroyed all at once by great diluvial currents or dislocations of the crust;
The energy of geological processes is steady over time; it is not the case that geological processes are tending inexorably to diminution;
There is a steady and continuous production of heat from inside the planet; the earth is not steadily cooling from an initial, molten condition;
Both aqueous and igneous causes are instruments of reproduction and decay, and these processes are balanced to preserve the earth in a kind of steady-state;
The elevation of land is an incremental process, always taking place somewhere on the earth; likewise the subsidence of the crust to form depressions;
The formation of mountain ranges is an incremental process whose activity is not cramped into narrow intervals of time;
There are no global geological processes, including global rises and falls in sea level, and global-scale tectonic events.
And so on. More claims could probably be added to this list, but you get the idea. These were substantive claims about the earth and its history, which Lyell treated as more than speculative hypotheses.* Some even bore weight within the broader framework of Lyell’s geology. The piecemeal extinction of species, for example, was the basis of a new method for dating the Tertiary strata based on the ratio of living to extinct species in a basin: Lyell’s “fossil chronometer.” Likewise, his skepticism about global tectonic processes is what allowed him to interpret strandlines as evidence of local uplift. Perhaps these are not what Secord has in mind when he speaks of “the substantive claims in the Principles,” and it’s true that Lyell does not state all of the claims as declarative sentences. Still, it has been obvious to many readers that Lyell was doing something more than saying: “to be scientific, geologists must reason as if [e.g.] the history of the earth is continuous.” In addition, he was giving reasons to think that the history of the earth is continuous, which is to say, defending a theory.
The last point warrants another word. In Secord’s view, “uniformity [for Lyell] was not a theory about the actual history of nature, but a policy for securing the philosophical foundations of geology” (Secord 1997, ix). This implies that some of the claims listed above were not substantive claims about the world, but were instead regulative principles, or principles of reasoning. But if (e.g.) claims about the uniform energy of geological processes were intended to be merely regulative, it has to be said that Lyell made every effort to convince his readers that the claims “fit” the world (which is to say, that they accommodate the facts better than competing claims). At which point, the distinction between regulative principles and substantive claims breaks down, or at least ceases to mark a real distinction in the argument. Lyell thought that— in order to be philosophical— geologists must treat geological processes as if they have always operated at the same intensities. Yet he also thought that— as a matter of fact— geological processes have always operated at the same intensities, and to think otherwise was a function of bias, ignorance or laziness. So if it’s a regulative principle that geological processes have always operated at the same intensities, it’s not just a regulative principle; and this is the nub of the old complaint that Lyell titrated his methodological recommendations with geotheory (e.g., Gould 1987, Rudwick 2008).
There is one exception to Secord’s general reluctance to discuss Lyell’s theoretical aims. As Secord argues, it was Lyell’s deeply negative reaction to Lamarck’s evolutionary theory that led him to deny that the history of life has a directional pattern:
If evolution was true, Lyell believed, no divinely implanted reason spirit or soul would set human beings apart; they would be nothing but an improved form of the apes that he watched, fascinated, at the newly opened London Zoo. Evolution was a dirty, disgusting doctrine, which raised fears of miscegenation and sexual corruption… [In addition] it undermined his lofty conception of science as the search for laws governing a perfectly adapted divine creation… (Secord 1997, xxxiii)
Secord concludes that it was “these secret fears [that] shaped not only the explicit attacks on evolution in Lyell’s second volume, but his entire geological system” (see especially Bartholomew 1973). Here, then, was a theoretical aim: to build a system of geology or “geotheory” that ruled out progressive evolution on a fundamental level.
This allows us to see the iguanodon line in a slightly different light. Instead of being a colorful expression of a deeply held commitment— a window into a worldview— the cycling of the “great year” emerges instead as a flanking maneuver against progressive evolution. Lyell had a worldview, which was an update of the Huttonian picture he had absorbed via John Playfair. But the worldview had less to do with grand cycles than with the balance of forces that maintained the planet’s surface in a condition of continuous habitability. Lyell’s worldview, in other words, was not inherently opposed to organic progression.* Rather, his opposition to arose out of an emotionally-charged interest in making “any account of species origination that [depended] upon the close temporal juxtaposition of structurally related organic forms impossible” (Bartholomew 1973, 265).
[* What I mean is that Lyell’s opposition to organic progression was not straightforwardly derivable from the nuts and bolts of his “system” (described above). As evidence for this, consider that Darwin and Wallace saw themselves as pursuing “unfinished Lyellian business”— as out-Lyell-ing even Sir Charles (Hodge 1971, quoted in Bartholomew 1973).]
The popular “bear pit” at the newly opened London Zoo
So, to reiterate what I said above, it is by no means clear who comes out on top in the Rudwick-Secord tussle. Rudwick, I think, pushes a useful insight too far when he claimed that “the most fundamental object of the [Principles] was to establish… a non-directional, steady-state theory of earth, in opposition to theories involving directional changes either in the earth itself or in the forms of life on earth.” Lyell did have theoretical aims in the Principles: in Rudwick’s words, to provide “an explanation [of heterogeneous phenomena] as comprehensive as the directionalist synthesis [he wished] to supplant” (Rudwick 1970, 8). But no less important was the aim of turning geology into a proper science, since this was how Lyell proposed to absolve an activity with links to “infidelity and revolutionary atheism,” and so render it safe for a genteel audience (Secord 1997, xxiv). Always we must remember that Lyell wrote his Principles for several distinct audiences. So, while the book may have been “one long argument” for a steady-state geotheory as far as professional geologists were concerned, it is just as accurate to say, with Secord, that “[in] the context of the Regency the Principles was a Trojan horse [for intellectual reform]” (Secord 1997, xxxv).
But there is something missing in Secord’s account too. So concerned is he to deny that Lyell was a geo-cosmologist, that he tends to lose sight of Lyell as theorist and system builder. Yet Lyell was both these things. There are systems beyond speculative cosmologies, and just such a system was Lyell’s “steady-state geotheory” (or whatever you want to call it). Lyell was not a “cosmogonist,” nor the historian of time’s cycle; but he was a geological theorist of great breadth and power.
* * *
I have one last thing to say, which is unrelated to my discussion of Rudwick and Secord. That is: I don’t ever want to hear that Lyell’s Principles focused largely or exclusively on “slow and insensible changes” (or whatever). If you’ve read the book, it’s hard to suppress the thought that Lyell was a man obsessed with catastrophes. Vivid accounts of every sort of calamity under the sun pour from his pages. Earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, violent landslides— you name it, Lyell’s got it.
The reason is not far to seek. Lyell’s book was subtitled, An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, and obviously this project stood a better chance of success if “causes now in operation” were capable of acting with great energy. So Lyell revels in the power of geological processes. It’s just that he rejects the capital-C catastrophes beloved of many of his contemporaries (global floods, mega-tsunamis, catastrophic upheavals). So, yes, Lyell believed that certain geological processes operated with great slowness. The deposition of sediments in river deltas jumps to mind. Likewise the erosion of sediments by running water. But to say, as many have, that Lyell was mostly or exclusively concerned with these leisurely processes is to commit a serious historical blunder.
References
Bartholomew, M. 1973. Lyell and evolution: an account of Lyell’s response to the prospect of an evolutionary ancestry for man. The British Journal of the History of Science 6:261–303.
Gould, S. J. 1987. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Laudan, R. 1987. From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650–1830. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lyell, C. 1830. Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, Vol. 1. London: John Murray.
Reid, T. 1785. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Dublin: L. White.
Rudwick, M. J. S. 1970. The strategy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Isis 61:4–33.
Rudwick, M. J. S. 2008. Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Secord, J. A. 1997. “Introduction” to the Penguin Classics edition of Principles of Geology. New York: Penguin Books.
Secord, J. A. 2014. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, L. 1980. Geology on the eve of Charles Lyell’s first visit to America, 1841. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124:168–202.