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new editions, perhaps too frequently, for commercial more than intellectual
motives. Lyell's similar behavior has prompted the general misinterpretation
of his great work as a textbook in the usual sense. As I argued above (see
page 104), it is no such thing; Principles of Geology is a brief for a world
view—time's stately cycle as the incarnation of rationality.
I believe that all truly seminal works of our intellectual history are coherent
arguments for grand visions. Lyell's Principles lies squarely in this greatest
of all scholarly traditions, and yet, as I argue above, it has usually been read
as a work of the most opposite genre conceivable: the textbook, with its
pseudo-objectivity and impassive compendium of accepted information.
Grand visions require keys to unbolt their coherence. Often we lose those
keys when changing contexts of history bury the motivations of authors in
forgotten concerns. Lyell's Principles has suffered this fate. The key to its
coherence is Lyell's overarching vision of time's stately cycle—the
combination of his uniformities of rate and state. But we now view his brief
as a textbook because we no longer recognize this thread of unity. The real
Lyell has been sacrificed, in part by his own rhetoric, for the cardboard hero
of empirical truth. The great thinker, the scientist of vision, the man who
struggled so hard to grasp the empirical world as imbued with distinctive
meaning, becomes merely a superior scribe.
We can, at least, try to recover Lyell's vision by grasping the Principles as an
argument, not a compendium, Time's stately cycle is the thread of coherence,
for Lyell's Principles is a treatise on method, dedicated to defending this
vision in the face of a geological record that requires close interpretation,
not literal reading, to yield its secret support.
I have a personal theory that paradoxes of odd beginnings usually unlock the
meaning of great works. Darwin's Origin of Species does not announce a
revolution in thinking, but starts instead with a disquisition on variation
among breeds of pigeons (as Burnet begins by puzzling about floodwaters,
and Hutton with the paradox of the soil). When we recognize that Darwin's
defense of natural selection is an extended analogy from small-scale events
that we can watch and manipulate—artificial selection as practiced by agricul-
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