Abstract
This chapter has as its focus the geological texts, exploring Charles Lyell’s seminal treatise Principles of Principles (1830–1833), along with the work of the polymath William Whewell. As well as examining the nuances of Lyell’s geology, his methodology approach and his rhetoric, the chapter looks at Whewell’s reception of Principles and specifically at his characterisation of Lyell’s scientific approach as ‘uniformitarian’ in opposition to geological ‘catastrophism’. Whewell’s fascinating writings have received little literary critical attention; here, however, his highly influential work on the philosophy of science is treated alongside Lyell’s geological text in order to analyse the rhetorical strategies employed by both men, as, it is argued, a knowledge of these strategies is vital to the understanding not only of Tennyson’s sophisticated use of geology but also the ideological concerns that shaped geological thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3 vols., 1830–1833 (1990), 1: 63. Hereafter cited as PG parenthetically by volume and page number.
- 2.
William Whewell, Indications (1845), 155.
- 3.
The concept is explained in full in volume two of Whewell’s, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols., 1837 (1967). For a comprehensive analysis of Whewell’s ‘consilience of inductions’, see Larry Laudan, Science and Hypothesis (2010).
- 4.
Anderson and Taylor, “Tennyson” (2015), 365–6.
- 5.
James Secord, “Introduction,” in Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, J.A. Secord ed. (1997), xix.
- 6.
Anderson and Taylor, “Tennyson” (2015), 346.
- 7.
A.T. to R.M.M., Nov 1 (1836) Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson I, 1821–1850, Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. eds. (1982), 145. Hereafter cited as Letters ALT by volume and page number.
- 8.
Lyell to Roderick Murchison, January 15 (1829) Life Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart, Katherine Lyell ed., 2 vols. (1881), I: 234.
- 9.
See Nicolaas Rupke, The Great Chain of History (1983), 193.
- 10.
Stephen J. Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), 112.
- 11.
Ibid., 117.
- 12.
Ibid., 118–9.
- 13.
Other more specific terms were available also, as Martin Rudwick shows, the Swiss geologist and meteorologist Jean-André de Luc (1727–1817) used the term “actual causes” to describe the approach that looks at processes actually occurring in order to help understand the operations of the past, but that does not, however, assume that “everything”, in terms of geological features, can necessarily “be explained by the gradual action of ordinary processes observable in the present day”. “Hence”, as Rudwick writes, “the analytical term actualism, applied to the earth sciences, denotes the methodological strategy of using a comparison with observable present features, processes, or phenomena as the basis for inferences about the unobservable deep past: in epigrammatic form, ‘the present is the key to the past’” (Worlds Before Adam, 2008), 14, 15, n. 4.
- 14.
Buckland, Novel Science (2013), 25. Buckland offers a major reassessment of nineteenth-century geology and the novel, demonstrating the rich culture from which it emerged. Buckland adds to the re-visioning of the history of geology by suggesting that “Differences between geologists were subtle and complex, determined much less by religious denomination (as is sometimes asserted) than by forms of publication, institutional affiliations, networks of friendships and collaboration, access to travel, and regional differences, and to the exhibitions, museums, lectures, and written works these men produced and consumed” (25).
- 15.
For articles specifically on this topic, see, for example, Martin Rudwick, “The Strategy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology” (1970). Michael Bartholomew, “Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell’s Response to the Prospect of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man” (1972–1973). Michael Bartholomew, “The Non-Progress of Non-Progression: Two Responses to Lyell’s Doctrine” (1976).
- 16.
James Secord, “Introduction,” in Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1997), xxxi.
- 17.
Lyell’s personal religious beliefs figure little in letters and journals written in the 1820s and 1830s, while his letters do indicate his continual struggle against the demands Scriptural orthodoxy imposed on his writing. J.M.I. Klaver suggests that Lyell’s “greatest religious influence was probably John Milton, a copy of whose Paradise Lost he won in a contest for reciting poetry at school at Midhurst”. Lyell’s interest in Milton stems probably from its “dramatic description of life on earth, which could not but appeal to the imaginative mind of a scientist”. See, Geology and Religious Sentiment (1997), 15.
- 18.
Secord, Charles Lyell (1997), xxxiii.
- 19.
Lyell to Mantell, March 2 (1827) Life Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart, 2 vols., Katherine Lyell ed. (1881), I, 168.
- 20.
Klaver, Geology (1997), 51–2.
- 21.
Secord suggests Lyell’s criticism of Lamarck in the Principles volume two “made evolutionary theory accessible throughout the English-speaking world, beyond a narrow circle of naturalists, medical lecturers and political radicals” Charles Lyell (1997), xxx.
- 22.
Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (1992), 329.
- 23.
Bartholomew, “Lyell and Evolution” (1976), 268.
- 24.
Porter, “Charles Lyell”, 97.
- 25.
Roy Porter, “Charles Lyell and the Principles of the History of Geology” (1976), 98.
- 26.
Ibid., 98.
- 27.
James Hutton, The Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations, 3 vols. (1795). Facsimile edition (1959).
- 28.
For a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetic engagement with Hutton’s uniformitarian geology, see Geric, “Shelley’s ‘cancelled cycles’: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophe in Prometheus Unbound” (2013).
- 29.
Porter suggests “It is well known that Toulmin’s ideas bear close resemblance, in their uniformitarianism, to those of Hutton and his followers, and scholarly debate has raged as to whether Toulmin plagiarized from Hutton, or vice versa.” “Philosophy and Politics of a Geologist: G.H. Toulmin (1754–1817)” (1978), 437n.
- 30.
Ibid., 436.
- 31.
G.H. Toulmin, The Eternity of the Universe (1789) from the final page of the unnumbered Introduction.
- 32.
Roy Porter, Charles Lyell (1976), 92.
- 33.
Rudwick, Introduction to Principles (1990), vol. I, xxxviii.
- 34.
Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in France, L.G. Mitchell ed. (1993), 86.
- 35.
Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show (2007), 167.
- 36.
See Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time (2005), 175.
- 37.
Alexander Ospovat, “The Distortion of Werner in Lyell’s Principles of Geology” (1976), 191–2.
- 38.
For an in-depth reading of Lyell’s literary style, see Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show (2007), 163–87.
- 39.
William Whewell, Indications of the Creator: Extracts from The History of the Inductive Sciences (1845), 147–8.
- 40.
William Whewell, Indications (1845), 155.
- 41.
Interestingly, Whewell argued for teleological development using the ‘nebular hypothesis’ and the evidence of chemistry.
- 42.
Martin Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam (2008), 300.
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Geric, M. (2017). “Uniformitarian Arguments Are Negative Only”: Lyell and Whewell. In: Tennyson and Geology. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66110-0_3
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