Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 151

Lyell as triumphant scribe. Gilluly, Waters, and Woodford, for example,
write (1968, 18): "The uniformitarian principle, proposed by James Hutton of
Edinburgh in 1785, was popularized in a textbook by the great Scottish
geologist Charles Lyell in 1830." We have seen that methodological versions
of uniformity were the common property of all scientists, defended by both
Hutton and Lyell, but scarcely original with them. (We cannot even label
Hutton as a champion of actualism, for he argued that forces of subterranean
consolidation were invisible on today's earth, and must be inferred from the
character of ancient rocks exposed by uplift.) Hutton and Lyell shared, above
all, the controlling vision of time's cycle, the uniformity of state. Even here
they differed, for Hutton promoted a sequential view, and held that periods of
uplift might be global and catastrophic, while all stages of Lyell's cycle
operate locally and simultaneously, giving the earth a timeless steadiness
through all its dynamic churning. An observer might visit Hutton's earth and
see only the quietude of subterranean deposition, while another visitor, a
million years later, might find a planet convulsed by uplift. The pieces of
Lyell's globe shift constantly, but all processes are always working
somewhere—at about the same intensity and amount.
I do not, however, view Lyell's union of rate and state (time's stately cycle),
and Hutton's more catastrophic notion of uplift, as their most important
difference. We need to recapture the dichotomy of their day—time's arrow
versus time's cycle—to grasp their deeper divergence in different attitudes
toward the meaning of time's cycle.
Hutton carried out his strict version of the Newtonian program so completely
that his view of our planet became idiosyncratic—to a point where he
actually denied the subject that students of the earth have always advanced as
their fundamental motivation: history itself, defined as a sequence of
particular events in time. Temporal distinction has no meaning in Hutton's
world, and he never used the language of historical uniqueness to describe
the earth. The corresponding events of each cycle are so alike that we can
scarcely