Visions of Science : Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (9780191662768) by Secord James

Author:Secord, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr
Published: 2014-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

This was a Cartesian moment, but one especially suited to the man of knowledge in action. The philosopher did not sit in a stove-heated room as Descartes had done two centuries before, but instead explored bandit-infested country with hammer in hand. Conversion was prompted not by abstract contemplation, but by limestones, shells, and marls. And behind the reference to Descartes was a biblical one: like Saint Paul, the author changed his ‘creed’ on the road. The most controversial claims of the Principles concerned what John McPhee has called ‘deep time’,41 in suggesting that other practising geologists, having abandoned the biblical timescale, had failed to realize the interpretive power of the ages at their disposal. Through the force of rhetoric, deep time was vouchsafed as a revelation from nature, realized through a secular pilgrimage.

In underlining the immensity of past time the Principles needed to distance its arguments from claims that the earth was eternal, for these had been commonplace in Enlightenment diatribes against religion. The issue of eternalism arose most acutely in relation to the crystalline rocks often found at the heart of mountain chains. Following the writings of Hutton and Playfair, the Principles argued that these rocks—previously called ‘Primary’—were not remnants of an original molten state of the planet, but could in fact be formed at any time. Those that had a stratified appearance, a chapter in the third volume suggested, should be termed ‘metamorphic’ to emphasize that they were altered strata of diverse ages. This meant (as Lyell wrote, misquoting Hutton as usual) that ‘I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end’.42 To suggest that science should abandon the search for origins did not imply that there never was a beginning, or that there would never be an end—questions ‘worthy a theologian’.43 This reaffirmed that the Principles was not a cosmological treatise, but a manifesto for pursuing science. Rude attacks upon cherished beliefs before the time was ripe, as Lyell reiterated in private letters, were unjustified, unproductive, and ungentlemanly. He contrasted his strategy with that of the freethinking Edinburgh physician George Hoggart Toulmin, whose Eternity of the World of 1785 had been reissued by a radical publisher in the 1820s. In a letter, Lyell compared Toulmin with English soldiers who had raided Burmese temples for war trophies:

To insult their idols was an act of Christian intolerance, and, until we can convert them, should be penal. If a philosopher commits a similar act of intolerance by insulting the idols of an European mob (the popular prejudices of the day), the vengeance of the more intolerant herd of the ignorant will overtake him, and he may have less reason to complain of his punishment than of its undue severity.

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