James Hutton's Theory of the Earth: A Machine without a History - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 77

soil, the substrate of agriculture, and all life. Soil must be rich and constant to
fulfill the earth's final cause as an abode for life.
Soil, generated from eroding rocks, is a product of destructive forces: "For
this great purpose of the world, the solid structure of this earth must be
sacrificed; for, the fertility of our soil depends upon the loose and incoherent
state of its materials" (1795, II, 89). But if the destruction of land continue
unabated, continents will eventually wash into the sea: "The heights of our
land are thus levelled with the shores; our fertile plains are formed from the
ruins of the mountains" (1788, 215). The process that sustains life will
eventually destroy it: "The washing away of the matter of this earth into the
sea would put a period to the existence of that system which forms the
admirable constitution of this living world" (1795, I, 550).
Efficient causes on a benevolent earth cannot undermine the final causes of
stability for human life. Yet the soil undoubtedly arises by destruction.
Hutton therefore argues that a restorative force must exist to rebuild the
continents. Moreover, if the source of uplift can be rendered as a
consequence of prior destruction, then our earth embodies the simplest and
most harmonious of possible systems—not two independent forces of
breaking and making locked in delicate balance, but a single cycle
automatically sustaining a steady state of benevolence. If erosion not only
makes soil but also deposits strata for continents of the next cycle, the
paradox of the soil can be resolved with elegance: "But, if the origin of this
earth is founded in the sea, the matter which is washed away from our land is
only proceeding in the order of the system; and thus no change would be
made in the general system of this world, although this particular earth,
which we possess at present, should in the course of nature
disappear" (1795,1, 550).
Hutton could not have stated more clearly that he deduced the necessary
existence of uplifting forces as a required solution to the paradox of the soil—
a dilemma in final cause. Deep time, inherent in the resulting cyclicity,
belongs to the logical structure of his a