Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 111

pejorative descriptions of anti-uniformitarian reprobates (III, 2-3): "They felt
themselves at liberty to indulge their imaginations, in guessing at what might
be, rather than in inquiring what is"; "they employed themselves in
conjecturing what might have been the course of nature at a remote period";
they preferred to "speculate on the possibilities of the past, than patiently to
explore the realities of the present"; they "invented theories." "Never was
there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge
of curiosity, than this assumption of the discordance between the former and
the existing causes of change." Students were "taught to despond from the
first." Geology could "never rise to the rank of an exact science"; it became
"a boundless field for speculation." And finally, LyelPs most famous
metaphor: "we see the ancient spirit of speculation revived, and a desire
manifested to cut, rather than patiently to untie, the Gordian knot" (III, 6).
By contrast, consider the favorable phrases that describe uniformitarian
heroes. They devote themselves to "inquiring what is," to "investigation of...
the course of nature in their own times." They try "patiently to explore the
realities of the present" by "candid reception of the evidence of those minute,
but incessant mutations . . ." They have "hope of interpreting the enigmas";
they "undertake laborious inquiries" on the "complicated effects of the
igneous and aqueous causes now in operation." Theirs is an "earnest and
patient endeavor" (III, 2-3).
In illustrating three modes of Lyell's rhetoric—the invocation of history, the
use of metaphor, and the contrast of adjectives—I have tried to show how he
set up his preferred form of geology as the right (and righteous) side of a
strict dichotomy between vain speculation and empirical truth, defined,
respectively, as belief that causes worked differently on an ancient earth
versus conviction that our planet has remained in a dynamic steady state
throughout time.
The reality of history is so much more complex and interesting; the irony of
history is that Lyell won. His version became a semiofficial hagiography of
geology, preached in textbooks to the present day. Professional historians
know better, of course, but their