Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 122

frequent or general than we expect them to be in time to come. (I, 89)
Lyell defends the third uniformity with his characteristic ploys of rhetoric.
He marshals, for example, his whiggish view of historical progress to assert
that lingering notions of worldwide paroxysm are vestiges of a savage past
when men huddled in fear before the thunderbolt.
The superstitions of a savage tribe are transmitted through all the progressive
stages of society, till they exert a powerful influence on the mind of the
philosopher. He may find, in the monuments of former changes on the earth's
surface, an apparent confirmation of tenets handed down through successive
generations, from the rude hunter, whose terrified imagination drew a false
picture of those awful visitations of floods and earthquakes, whereby the
whole earth as known to him was simultaneously devastated. (I, 9)
The replacement of catastrophe by accumulated slow change is die very
essence of progress:
The mind was slowly and insensibly withdrawn from imaginary pictures of
catastrophes and chaotic confusion, such as haunted the imagination of the
early cosmogonists. Numerous proofs were discovered of the tranquil
deposition of sedimentary matter and the slow development of organic life.
(I, 72)
(Note how the progress of mind mirrors nature's own way—"slowly and
insensibly.")
Catastrophism, by its very nature, is antimpirical:
Instead of confessing the extent of their ignorance, and striving to remove it
by bringing to light new facts, they would be engaged in the indolent
employment of framing imaginary theories concerning catastrophes and
mighty revolutions in the system of the universe. (I, 84)