1. Uniformitarianism in Geology. The term “uni-
formitarianism” was introduced by William Whewell
in 1840 to label a certain scientific theory, contrasted
with catastrophism. The issue as discussed by Whewell
and his contemporaries primarily presented itself in
geology. Charles (later Sir Charles) Lyell (1830) was
the most prominent advocate of uniformitarianism.
In geology, the issue arose for two main reasons. (1)
It appeared from the geological record that there were
changes, in both the inorganic and the organic realms,
too great or too sudden to be accounted for by causes
now known to be in operation. (2) Even more impor-
tant, anything like a literal interpretation of the Bible
seemed to call for a catastrophic view. It was not
generally supposed that the Creation, or Work of the
Six Days, took six twenty-four hour periods to com-
plete, but it was generally supposed that, instead of
setting the universe up by a “single decree” (as Leibniz
called it, Causa Dei, §42, and Fifth Letter to Clarke,
§66), after which only “secondary causes” were at
work, the Creator divided his total act of creation into
several separate acts, of which all but the first
supervened upon and altered a world already in opera-
tion. In addition to the Creation, another episode from
Genesis—the Flood—had obvious bearing on geology.
And one who applies the uniformitarian idea not, as
Lyell did, only in geology, but in all natural science
would exclude all miracles, whether alleged in the Old
Testament or the New: the burning bush, Aaron's rod
turning into a serpent, the rolling back of the waters
of the Red Sea, Christ walking on water, etc. And it
happened that in Genesis there is a linguistic episode
that poses scientific problems rather like those of the
Creation and the Flood.
Lyell's uniformitarianism is commonly treated only
as a precursor of Darwin's evolutionism. It is clear—see
especially Eiseley (1958), who in effect (pp. 108, 113,
115) defends the way in which Huxley (1869) distin-
guishes evolutionism from uniformitarianism—that
Darwin went beyond Lyell not merely in dealing with
the biological realm, including man, but also in his
positive theory of natural selection. Uniformitarianism
(extended to organic evolution) said there was a law;
Darwin said what the law was. And we may distinguish
between uniformitarianism and evolutionism as fol-
lows. Uniformitarianism as such says nothing about the
limits of change over time, but says only that the
“laws” or “causes” of change are uniform over time,
i.e., are the same at all times. We may call “qualified
uniformitarianism” the doctrine that admits one ex-
ception to this, or at most two exceptions, namely a
first moment of the universe and perhaps also a last
moment, in which, respectively, creation was started
and annihilation was completed. It was thought to be
a corollary of uniformitarianism that only those laws,
or those causes, which are at work now—adapting a
phrase of Newton's, these were called verae causae—
were ever at work.
Uniformitarianism so defined says nothing as to
whether life evolved from inorganic matter, or man
from brute, or some other species of living thing from
another species. How it differs from evolutionism may
be brought out by an example: the causal relation of
life to inorganic matter. According to uniformitarian-
ism, either (1) there was never a time when there were
not living things on the earth, or (2) there was such
a time, and a later time when there were living things,
but the transition from the earlier to the later state
could be exhaustively explained in terms of laws that
held good at both states and indeed at all states. Of
the two possibilities compatible with uniformitarian-
ism, only the second is evolutionary. What uniformi-
tarianism rules out is the supposed possibility that the
transition from an earlier stage with no life to a later
stage with life was accomplished not by the prevailing
laws of nature but by a miracle or other extraordinary
direct intervention of the Creator.
What was the argument for uniformitarianism? In
retrospect we are inclined to see the issue as at bottom
one of scientific autonomy. Was natural science to be
guided—constrained, as those who deplored the
guidance would say—by premisses allegedly furnished
by Revelation, or was natural reason to be its own sole
lawgiver? Lyell and his contemporaries did not, how-
ever, see the issue in this way. Both sides, whether
partisans or critics, put the issue in terms of “proba-
bility,” this being determined by what was most con-
formable to the Creator's intention (Lyell [1830-33],
1, 164, quoted by Gillispie [1951], p. 121; Huxley, in
Darwin [1888], 1, 541). Lyell's formulation was
muddied by the self-imposed limitation, justified no
doubt but trouble-making, that he only undertook to
defend uniformitarianism in application to strictly
geological phenomena, not carrying it back “beyond
the veil of stratified rock” (Huxley [1869], p. 313) to
the earliest stages of our terrestrial globe, nor forward
to living organisms. In other words, he virtually situ-
ated geology in between physics (and chemistry and
astronomy) and biology, and for the most part refrained
from treating its border-sciences, either uniformitari-
anly or in any other manner. There is only a termi-
nological difference between saying, with Huxley (ibid.,
pp. 315, 319) that this limitation of scope imposed by
Lyell is inherent in uniformitarianism, and saying that
Lyell himself was not an out-and-out uniformitarian.
Lyell's views on organic evolution are very compli-
cated (Eiseley, Ch. 4).
