Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 129

tional world machine with endlessly cycling phases of uplift, erosion,
deposition, consolidation, and uplift—an earthly mechanics beautifully
consonant with the fourth uniformity of state. But Lyell criticized Hutton for
viewing the stages of his cycle as a global succession and, especially, for the
catastrophic character of his periods of uplift—a violation in the third
uniformity of rate. He cited as "one of the principal defects" of Mutton's
theory "the assumed want of synchronism in the action of the great antagonist
powers— the introduction, first, of periods when continents gradually wasted
away, and then of others when new lands were elevated by violent
convulsions" (II, 196). Lyell insisted upon stately unfolding going nowhere.
No logical connection unites the two substantive uniformities of rate and
state. One could, like Hutton, accept nondirection while advocating
catastrophic periods of uplift. But Lyell's vision joined them neatly and
tightly. I shall subsequently refer to Lyell's junction of rate and state, the
essence of his world view, as "time's stately cycle."
Similarly, as "catastrophism" confutes by its name only the third uniformity
(of rate), pretenders to this tide might espouse paroxysm without direction.
But all prominent catastrophists of Lyell's day also linked the uniformities of
rate and state—by denying them both. From Cuvier, d'Orbigny, and Elie de
Beaumont in France, to Agassiz in Switzerland (and then America), to
Buckland and Sedgwick in England, they agreed that occasional paroxysm
had been the predominant mode of substantial change on an ancient earth.
These catastrophes occurred as direct consequences of the primary and
inherent directionality that had also provoked the progressive increase in
life's complexity—cooling of the globe. So tight was this link between
catastrophe and direction that Martin Rudwick and other historians prefer to
designate this theory as "the directionalist synthesis."
Since the catastrophists of Lyell's day were fine scientists, not the vestigial
miracle-mongers that Lyell described in his rhetoric, their characteristic
linkage of catastrophe and direction rested upon re-