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Updated: June 8, 2025
The limitations implied in these passages appear to me to constitute the weakness and the logical defect of uniformitarianism.
This view was held more or less distinctly, sometimes combined with the notion of recurrent cycles of change, in ancient times; and its influence has been felt down to the present day. It is worthy of remark that it is a hypothesis which is not inconsistent with the doctrine of Uniformitarianism, with which geologists are familiar.
The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play.
This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things which are, to those which were this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost Uniformitarianism the place, as the permanent form of geological speculation, which it might otherwise have held.
I have said that the three schools of geological speculation which I have termed Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, and Evolutionism are commonly supposed to be antagonistic to one another; and I presume it will have become obvious that, in my belief, the last is destined to swallow up the other two.
I find three, more or less contradictory, systems of geological thought, each of which might fairly enough claim these appellations, standing side by side in Britain. I shall call one of them CATASTROPHISM, another UNIFORMITARIANISM, the third EVOLUTIONISM; and I shall try briefly to sketch the characters of each, that you may say whether the classification is, or is not, exhaustive.
The doctrine of evolution in biology is the necessary result of the logical application of the principles of uniformitarianism to the phenomena of life. Darwin is the natural successor of Hutton and Lyell, and the "Origin of Species" the logical sequence of the "Principles of Geology."
For the purposes of the present discourse I may take this last to be what is meant by "geological speculation." Now uniformitarianism, as we have seen, tends to ignore geological speculation in this sense altogether. The one point the catastrophists and the uniformitarians agreed upon, when this Society was founded, was to ignore it.
The long name of "uniformitarianism" is given to Lyell's doctrine, which has exerted an influence upon knowledge far outside the department of geology.
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