EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY by George McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Feb 22, 1905

EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By George McCready Price

BY GEO. McCREADY PRICE

XII. THE ASSUMPTION OF UNIFORMITY.

A Belated Science.

It is a singular and notable fact, that while most other branches of science have emancipated themselves from the trammels of metaphysical reasoning, the science of Geology still remains imprisoned in "à priori theories."—"The Glacial Nightmare and the Flood," Preface, VII., by Sir Henry Howorth.

This quotation, from a prominent, scientific English author, is a most unqualified impeachment of modern Geology (as currently taught) as fit to rank among the inductive sciences. Certainly the inductive method and the "à priori" method of reasoning are exact opposites. Hence it is an abuse of language to speak of the current Geology as one of the inductive sciences. Astronomy, physics, chemistry were in this condition ages ago and long continued thus; but, one after another, at the magic call of common sense and true scientific methods, they "have emancipated themselves from the trammels of metaphysical reasoning." But, sad to say, this belated science of Geology "still remains imprisoned in 'à priori' theories."

This and several of my succeeding articles will be written to amplify and illustrate this acknowledged fact.

"A priori" (literally, from what is before) is a term used to denote a method of reasoning which proceeds from cause to effect, or from an assumption to its logical conclusion. Geometry is an example of this method. The opposite of this is to reason from observed effects so as to discover the cause; to take a number of scattered facts in nature, and, by correlating them together, to trace out the principles or laws pervading them. This is the inductive method, the true scientific method, and is the way in which everything worth knowing in nature has been discovered. But by the confession of Howorth, himself a voluminous writer on Geology, this so-called science needs to face square about, as the other sciences have done, and proceed by wholly different methods. The reasons for this change, and the manner of bringing it about, is the task before us. "The crust of our globe," writes a distinguished scientist, "is a great cemetery where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs." The reading of these epitaphs makes up the larger part of the science of Geology; but it is certain that by false methods of reasoning, methods which, as Howorth says, have "all the infirmity of the science of the Middle Ages" (Id. Preface XIV.), we can never hope to read them aright, or discover from them a single fact or principle of which we can be certain regarding the conditions of their life or their burial.

To us of the twentieth century

Nature Is Not Capricious.

From the mote dancing in the sunbeam to the suns, and stars, and systems circling about the mysterious and far-off center of the universe, every atom of matter moves only in accordance with fixed and unalterable laws. Such is the case now, and such it has ever been so far as our reason can serve us for a guide. Even as the spectroscope has proved to us that the far-off nebulæ are composed of chemical elements similar to those about us and within us, so we know that nature is a unit in her manner of working, because her ways are all equally the expression of one eternal unconditioned Being who is perfect, and therefore unchangeable.

We may all agree that the laws or methods of nature are unchangeable; but who shall define for us the limits of "natural law"? When we assume, as the geologists do, that things have always happened, and must always happen, as we see them now occur about us, we are surely getting very unscientific in our self-conceit. How is it that we, the creatures of a day, know the limits of nature's marvelous laws, or that we dare boast of having mastered them all? I know not any one with the courage to affirm this in the abstract; tho it seems that we are, many of us, inclined at times to arrive at conclusions, or adopt methods of research, which tacitly involve these preposterous assumptions.

And yet, from our faith in the eternal truth of nature, we can only judge of the past by what we know of the present; we can only know of the distant by what is beneath our touch. The present action and potentialities of earth and air, water and heat, must be our study, if we are ever to make any progress in understanding the oftentimes intricate and obscure records of the past of our race and of our world. If we found a dear friend lying dead by the roadside, we would not feel content to call in the aid of some old witch-doctor to tell us how people generally die of old age or otherwise; we would invoke the best scientific training that we could possibly obtain. For we don't want to know how people generally die, but how this particular person actually did die. And only one deeply versed in the laws of physiology and the normal action of the human body would be prepared to say whether our friend had died a violent death, or one due to ordinary or "natural" causes.

Man Contemporary with the Extinct Animals.

Contrary to all that the geologists taught for nearly a hundred years, some unmistakable relics of our own species have now been found fossil in conditions which show them to have been positively contemporary with hosts of "extinct" animals which lived when the land and water were very differently distributed from the way they are to-day, and when a totally-different mantle of air and climate was spread over all. Hence we take up with renewed zeal the study of the action of the elements, for only by a right understanding of their present powers and possibilities can we hope to arrive at a correct solution of those myriad problems arising about the conditions of that ancient world, and of the causes which ended those conditions and ushered in the present order of things.

What Uniformity Teaches.

In the ordinary text-books we are told that the present surface of our earth which seems so stable is in reality not so, but rising in some places and subsiding in others at a very slow rate; and that these movements of level, prolonged

over the vast eons of an abysmal past, have resulted in the dry land and the water changing places almost times without end.

In some places (according to the theory) these slow and gradual changes of level have resulted in the bottoms of ancient seas, with their accumulated load of shells and sediment, being now found pushed up into lofty mountains thousands of feet above the level of the ocean. At the same time, and in other localities, "the sea, like a huge plane, shaves away league after league of the land," and conquers once more the territory snatched from it in some previous age. Even the "eternal hills," now high and dry, are by these lieutenants of the sea, "the river saw, the chisel of heat and frost, the ice wedge, the glacial file," working away "without haste, without rest," being slowly but surely brought down once more also beneath the dominion of that mighty liquid mantle which sometime in a past eternity was spread out over the yet unborn land. In short, we are taught that the action of the elements during all past time has been uniform with the present in character, perhaps even in degree, and that the landscape spread before us now in mountain and valley, river and lake, is but the final result of activities identical in character and methods with the present.

This is Uniformitarianism, which Howorth characterized as "the religion founded by Hutton, whose high priest was Lyell," and which is thus defined by the Standard Dictionary:

The doctrine that essential uniformity in causes and effects, forces and phenomena, has prevailed in all ages of the world's physical history, and that the activities of the past were similar in mode and intensity to those of the present.

Dana says about the same thing:

The method of interpreting the records rests upon the simple principle that rocks were made as they are now made through common-place operations.—Manual p. 15, Fourth Ed.

Professor Ramsey was even more plain and positive, for in his address to the British Association in 1880, he said:

From the Laurentian epoch down to the present day, all the physical events in the history of the earth have varied neither in kind nor intensity from those which we now have experienced.

The Theory and the Word.

The first thought which probably occurs here to the reader is that the statement of this theory is a point-blank denial of the Biblical Deluge. This alone would be sufficient to make the believer in Genesis sure that there must be something wrong with it; but our task now is to determine in a scientific way just where and how it is wrong.

This, however, is not hard to do. For it is easy to see that this theory of Uniformity, which says "that nature has always used precisely the same tools and employed them in precisely the same way" as she has since recorded history began, is an assumption at the beginning, not a conclusion or induction at the close, of our investigation of the rocky records of the past. It is certainly not a conclusion from any fact or series of facts in nature, for how can we be sure that the elements have always acted in the regular methodical way they have since human observation began? There is certainly nothing in the rocks to support such an idea, but everything to the contrary.

The fact is this current doctrine of Uniformitarianism only came in as a preferable alternative to the "Catastrophism" of Cuvier; that it took ready-made the succession of life invented and used by this latter doctrine, and merely said that, given time enough, it would undertake to explain all these successive ages as possibly the result of ordinary slow-working causes, but neither Lyell nor any one else ever attempted to prove that this uniform action of the elements is the only thing that will explain the facts in the case. And to-day every single text-book on the subject starts out with this assumption of uniformity in its opening chapters, and studies all the strata from this standpoint. Hence, it is perfectly evident that if there is anything wrong with this succession of life idea which it received by inheritance from the "Catastrophism" of Cuvier and his predecessors, this doctrine of Uniformity may turn out useless, to say the least, if we have no ages to interpret.

Assuming What Should Be Proved.

But the point just here is that whether it is more reasonable than Catastrophism or some other doctrine has nothing to do with the matter. What I object to in the name of inductive science, is this preliminary assumption of a great general fact, the truth or falsity of which ought only to come in as a law arrived at as a generalization from the sum total of our investigations.

We are not ignorant of how the forces of nature now act, the degrees of their intensity, and the results of their work. Hence, instead, of prejudicing the case at the beginning of our investigations by assuming this uniformity during all past time, I say that the only scientific way is to make the truth or untruth of this general law a subject for investigation. Whether the air, the rivers, and the sea have always acted as we now see them act, it is our business to find out. To assume this general principle as a preliminary to our investigations of the past is to forever keep our science in the swaddling cloths of deductive methods which in this twentieth century ought to be considered a shame and a disgrace. If our science is good for anything at all, it is surely capable of deciding for us very positively whether or not the tools of nature have always worked at the same rate and with the same force as at present; and the investigation of this problem is without doubt the most important question that can engage our attention as geologists.

Facts Are Not Proved by Hypotheses.

That the laws of nature are immutable, that earth, air, and water are absolutely subordinate to these immutable laws, and that we can only judge of effects in the past by what we now see taking place in the world around us, are truths that every one admits. But as has been remarked by a not unknown author, this is very far from saying that 'the physical operations now going on are not only the type, but the measure of intensity of the physical powers acting on the earth at all anterior periods.' This is certainly 'to assume an unwarrantable hypothesis with no a priori probability.' As already intimated, it is in effect assuming to possess a knowledge of all natural law, and is deciding beforehand what ought to be left as a subject for investigation—both of which are the antithesis of true inductive methods. Says Adam Sedgwick:

The study of the great physical mutations on the surface of the earth, is the business of Geology. But who can define the limits of these mutations? They have been drawn by the hand of nature, and may be studied in the record of her works; but they never have been, and never will be, fixed by any guesses of our own, or by any trains of a priori reasoning based upon hypothetical analysis. We must banish all a priori reasoning from the threshold of our argument; and the language of theory can never fall from our lips with any grace or fitness, unless it appear as the simple enunciation of those general facts, with which, by observation alone, we have at length become acquainted. . . . An hypothesis is indeed (when we are all agreed on receiving it) an admirable means of marshalling scattered facts together. But by those who differ from us, an hypothesis will ever be regarded with just suspicion; for it too often becomes, even in spite of our best efforts, like a false horizon in astronomy, and vitiates all the results of our observations, however varied, or many times repeated.

The Geologist and the Coroner.

Whenever a human body is found dead in the open field, a coroner is called upon to investigate the matter and find out if possible how the man died. This coroner is, or should be, a man thoroughly acquainted with the normal action of the tissues and organs of the human body, for only by employing such knowledge can he hope to decide aright regarding the cause of the man's death.

But let us suppose that our coroner has seen hundreds of bodies cut up in the dissecting room, where death had resulted from all sorts of disease as well as old age, and that in his subsequent practise he has made autopsies upon great numbers of bodies which have likewise died from every imaginable disease; but that never in all his experience has he yet seen one where death resulted simply from loss of blood or bleeding to death. Such a thing, if not a probable case, will at least do as an illustration.

What would we think of such a man if he were to proclaim to all and sundry that he had never seen a case where death had resulted from other than 'natural' causes, and that he had no reason to believe that such had ever occurred? 'This man is very old. He must be over ninety. There is very little blood in his body, as is usual in old age, but all the organs and tissues seem to be in a healthy condition, and they evidently all gave out together, like the deacon's 'one hoss shay.' People can't live forever, even if they have no disease.' Such language would certainly sound very strange, and the crude methods of such an investigation would be very evidently absurd, but not really more so than the assumption of a uniform action of the elements during all past time.

Geologists are only coroners at large. On every bed, nay, on every fossil, we must hold a post mortem, and determine, independently of all theories, how these creatures died and how the bed was deposited. Uniformitarians would certainly make poor coroners, or, for that matter, poor investigators of law, or history, or anything else.