James Hutton's Theory of the Earth: A Machine without a History - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 97

other motivation echoes a theme of outstanding relevance today. Hutton did
not grasp the power, worth, and distinction of history. He followed a model
of science that exalted simple systems, subject to experiment and prediction,
over narrative and its irreducible uniquenesses. In so doing, he followed a
tradition of ordering the sciences by status—from the hard and more
"experimental" (physics and chemistry) to the soft and more
"descriptive" (natural history and systematics). Geology resides in the middle
of this false continuum, and has often tried to win prestige by aping the
procedures of sciences with higher status, and ignoring its own distinctive
data of history. This problem, born of low self-esteem, continues to our day.
Hutton pursued a chimerical view of rigor by deference to Newton, and
hoped to assimilate time to Newton's models for space. Today, this deference
may be expressed in a fetish for quantification that leads psychologists to
conceive intelligence as a single, measurable thing in the head, or biologists
to classify organisms by computer without judging the different historical
value of characters (the marsupial pouch as more informative than body
length).
Charles Lyell recognized the link between Hutton and Newton, but he also
noted an unhappy comparison—the triumph of cosmology versus the limited
success of Hutton's world machine. He attributed this unflattering difference
to the relative paucity of geological evidence, implying that diligence in
collecting data might close the gap: "Hutton labored to give fixed principles
to geology, as Newton had succeeded in doing to astronomy; but in the
former science too little progress had been made towards furnishing the
necessary data to enable any philosopher, however great his genius, to realize
so noble a project" (1830, I, 61). I dedicate this topic to a different view of
this discrepancy: time's cycle cannot, in principle, encompass a complex
history that bears irreducible signs of time's arrow. Hutton's rigidity is both a
boon and a trap. It gave us deep time, but we lost history in the process. Any
adequate account of the earth requires both.