Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 171

of his professional life—that he would probably have to abandon this anchor
of his central vision.
What does a man do in die face of such sadness? I suggest diat he usually
attempts to cut his losses and to beat a minimal retreat. Evolution served
Lyell as touchstone for this minimal retreat. Lyell didn't accept evolution
because Darwin persuaded him, or because he found the theory of natural
selection so powerful; he finally embraced transmutation because it permitted
him to preserve all other meanings of uniformity, once accumulating
evidence had reluctantly forced him to accept the fact of progress in life's
history.
If Darwin impressed Lyell with natural selection, the notebooks record no
hint. These private jottings are distinguished by Lyell's nearly total lack of
interest in mechanisms of evolutionary change— a decidedly peculiar
attitude if Lyell wavered because Darwin's theory had convinced him. The
entries record a few passages of criticism, for Lyell never accepted natural
selection, much to Darwin's disappointment. I particularly like Lyell's Hindu
metaphor, so well expressing the classical objection that natural selection
may act as an executioner of the unfit, but cannot create the fit: "If we take
the three attributes of the deity of the Hindoo Triad, the Creator, Brahma, the
preserver or sustainer, Vishnu, and the destroyer, Siva, Natural Selection will
be a combination of the two last but without the first, or the creative power,
we cannot conceive the others having any function" (in Wilson, 1970, 369).
The notebooks instead, with almost obsessive repetitiveness, record Lyell's
struggle about progress in life's history—particularly his supreme reluctance
to place human origins into nature's ordinary course. Yet, when finally forced
to admit both the fact of progress and the inclusion of humans in life's
standard sequence, what strategies could Lyell adopt to explain his retreat?
He imagined only two alternatives—he could either accept the progressionist
creed in toto, and admit both extraneous laws of progress and (most
distasteful of all) perhaps even periods of mass extinction with subsequent
recreation at higher levels of complexity; or he could ex-