Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 108

geology." Here, Lyell's comprehensive argument by history proceeds through
several stages:
1. Old and unfruitful views shared the common property of imagining (for
such beliefs could be defended only by speculation) that the ancient earth
operated under different causes working at different rates from modern
processes—a "discordance" between past and present modes of change, in
Lyell's phrase. "The sources of prejudice . . . are all singularly calculated to
produce the same deception, and to strengthen our belief that the course of
nature in the earlier ages differed widely from that now established" (I, 80).
2. Empirical observation of the earth permitted geologists to overcome these
superstitions about dissimilar pasts.
The first observers conceived that the monuments which the geologist
endeavors to decipher, relate to a period when the physical constitution of the
earth differed entirely from the present, and that, even after the creation of
living beings, there have been causes in action distinct in kind or degree from
those now forming part of the economy of nature. These views have been
gradually modified, and some of them entirely abandoned in proportion as
observations have been multiplied, and the signs of former mutations are
skillfully interpreted . . . Some geologists [now] infer that there has never
been any interruption to the same uniform order of physical events. (I, 75)
3. The undoing of anti-uniformitarian superstition by geologists parallels the
general path of enlightenment in human history.
We must admit that the gradual progress of opinion concerning the
succession of phenomena in remote eras, resembles in a singular manner that
which accompanies the growing intelligence of every people ... In an early
stage of advancement, when a great number of natural appearances are
unintelligible, an eclipse, an earthquake, a flood, or the approach of a comet,
with many other occurrences afterwards found to belong to the regular course
of events, are regarded as prodigies. The same delusion