KRONOS
I-4
Winter 1976
Foreword
"I
think any argument from such a reported radical as
myself," Charles Babbage wrote to the geologist
Charles Lyell on May 3, 1832, "would only injure the
cause, and I therefore willingly leave it in better
hands."
Charles Babbage (1792 - 1871) was Lucasian Professor
of Mathematics (1828-39) at the time, a dabbler in
geology, theology, and manufacturing, and had
recently made an unsuccessful bid for a seat in
parliament. In 1837, he would publish his The
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, an attack on the
theology of the Anglican establishment, and in 1851,
he would carry the attack into the Tory camp in his
Reflections on the Decline of Science in
England, the purpose of which was to argue that
wealthy Tory amateurs had a stranglehold on science
policy and were discriminating against socially less
well positioned scientists, who were more deserving
of support.
Charles Lyell (1797 - 1875), to whom he was writing,
had just published the second volume of his
Principles of Geology (volume 1, 1830, volume
11, 1832; and volume 111, 1833), a work written in
support of political liberalism--although ostensibly
it was an objective work in science free from any
political implications. In his letter of May 3 to Lyell, Babbage was explaining why he would not write
a favorable review of the book. Quite wisely, the
Whig scientists, like Babbage, Lyell, Scrope, Darwin
and Mantell, did not want the public to know that
that which was being promoted as objective truth was
little more than thinly disguised political
propaganda.
The purpose of this paper is to explicate what
Babbage means by the words "radical" and the word
"cause," when he writes, as quoted above: "I think
any argument from such a reported radical as myself
would only injure the cause, and I therefore leave
it in better hands." The first part of this paper
investigates the political implications of early
19th Century Geology. The second probes into the
nature of Babbage's and Lyell's "cause."
The Political Implications of
Early 19th Century Geology
In 1807 Humphrey Davy wrote to his friend William
Pepys: "We are forming a little talking geological
dinner club, of which I hope you will be a member."
Of the original thirteen members, four were
doctors, one an ex-unitarian minister. Two were
booksellers. Another, Comte JacquesLouis, had fled
the French Revolution. Four were Quakers, and two,
William Allen and Humphrey Davy, were independently
wealthy amateur chemists. Only one, George
Greenough, had any training in geology or
mineralogy--having paid a visit to the Academy at
Freiberg some years earlier along with Goethe--but he
did not pursue the subject for a living by any
stretch of the imagination. He was a member of
Parliament. Indeed, what is extraordinary about the
London Geological Society is that none of the
original members were geologists. "The little
talking dinner club," as Davy put it, was a club for
gentlemen given to talk, not to hammering rocks.
The following year 26 Fellows of the Royal Society
joined, including Joseph Banks, the President of the
Royal Philosophical Society, and the year after the
number of members had jumped to 173. The "little
talking dinner" club concept became unfeasible;
apartments were rented instead. There was talk of
publishing transactions, and Sir Joseph Banks,
fearing that the Geological Society would soon grow
bigger than his prestigious and ancient Royal
Philosophical Society, resigned in protest. By
1817, only ten years after its founding, the
Geological Society had more than 400 members, and in
1825 it was incorporated with a membership of 637.
The founding and early growth of the London
Geological Society is noteworthy for a number of
reasons. Earlier scientific societies, like the
Royal Academy in France and the Philosophical
Society in London, had had a much broader base.
There had been a few abortive attempts to start
specialized scientific societies in chemistry and in
botany, but they had come to nothing. The
Geological Society of London was really the first
specialized scientific society, and its early growth
was unprecedented--in fact, very difficult to account
for, especially when one recalls that its early
members were almost all doctors, lawyers and members
of Parliament; the Reverend William Buckland was
Dean of Westminster, and Sir Roderick Murchison was
an independently wealthy retired Army Officer.
That is not to say that there were no persons in
England actively engaged in what we would now
consider to be geological pursuits, for, indeed,
England was at the time going through a crash
program of canal building and mine exploration and
was about to enter the railroad age; but one is hard
pressed to find these working geologists on the
membership list. William Smith, for instance, the
most famous drainage engineer of the age, who
discovered the technique of correlation of strata by
means of fossils and is generally mentioned in
modern geological texts as the key geologist of the
era, was not invited to join the London Geological
Society. Perhaps he was too busy doing geology to
have time to talk about it, but if the truth be
told, the London Geological Society was a group of
talking amateurs whose interest in geology was for
its theological and political implications, not for
its application to mining and canal digging. These
theological and political implications were crucial
to the social stability of England and were
therefore by no means irrelevant to the early
history of geology.
The term "geology" had only recently been introduced
by the Swiss diluvialist, de Luc. In the Medieval
University curriculum one finds no place for the
study of the earth, which was deemed corrupt, a
product of the devil and therefore not worth
studying. Geometry, numerology, harmony and
astronomy better reflected the wisdom of God than
did the study of things of this world, the Medieval
Catholics believed, following Plato, but the
Protestant Reformation had changed all that.
Between the years 1680 and 1780 some five hundred
books and articles were published on geology,
ranging from Bishop Burnet's popular Sacred
Theory of the Earth (which ran through
seven editions between 1681 and 1753) to J. T.
Klein's scholarly monograph on a single class of
fossils, Dispositio Echinodermatum
(1732). The Protestants were keen to demonstrate
that God's handiwork was as easily seen in this
world as in the next, and particularly they were
eager to demonstrate the literal truth of a Bible
which declared that God had not only created all the
creatures of the earth, but had also brought down
the Deluge to punish man for his sins.
Shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when
the Catholics were driven out of England, a rash of
works appeared reconciling the book of Genesis
with the new research into nature. The most
successful of these was John Woodward's Essay
towards a Natural History of the Earth,
in which he explained the stratigraphic sequence of
rocks by supposing that during Noah's flood, all the
surface rocks of the earth had been dissolved by the
sea, later to be gradually precipitated out into the
stratigraphic sequences which now comprise the
secondary formations. Because the Woodwardian idea
preserved the theme of Genesis that the flood was
caused by divine decree to punish men for their
sins, it was favorably received by the Anglican
Church and later became, at the hands of the Tories,
a major bulwark in their defense of monarchy. In
1728, the Woodwardian professorship was founded at
Cambridge, the first academic recognition of the
field of what is now called "geology." Woodward's
ideas were articulated not only in England, but also
on the continent-particularly in the popular classes
of Abraham Gotlob Werner at Freiberg later in the
century, where Greenough, von Buch, Maclure,
Jamieson, Berger, and most of the other founders of
geology studied.
In the pursuit of Woodwardian geology, a number of
anomalies occurred--in particular, a lack of
correlation between new and old world strata as well
as overlays of basalt and granite in what were
supposed to be secondary deposits. As a result,
Leonard von Buch and Georges Cuvier modified the
early diluvial theory into a more general
catastrophic theory of the earth in which the earth
was seen as not having suffered one catastrophe, but
numerous catastrophes, of which the Deluge was but
the most recent example. To deny catastrophism
altogether was to deny the truth of the Bible, and
hence the theological implications of early geology
were quite clear.
In 1673 Bishop Bossuet, tutor to the Dauphin of
France, had drawn up his arguments in favor of
kingship into a treatise, Politics drawn from the
very Words of Holy Scripture, in which he
argued that monarchy was the most common, the most
ancient, and the most natural form of
government. The key word there was "natural." He
argued that nature provided evidence of being ruled
by a divine monarch, God himself, King of the
Universe, and that a King was then emulating God
when he ruled with absolute authority: "Thus we have
seen monarchy takes its foundation and pattern from
paternal control, that is from nature itself,"
Bishop Bossuet writes. The British spokesman for
monarchy, Robert Filmore, echoed Bossuet's words.
Monarchy was natural, because all of nature was
ruled by a divine absolute monarch, God himself.
In the course of the 18th century, as democratic
sentiments grew not only in America but throughout
all of Europe, the political theory of Bossuet and
Filmore was seriously challenged. John Locke in his
Treatises on Government and Jean Jacques
Rousseau in his Discourses
argued against the naturalness of monarchy in favor
of a social contract theory of government. But to
prove that monarchy was unnatural, it was necessary
to prove that the Bible's description of the Deluge
was inaccurate; that God had not created the
animals and plants of this earth and that he had not
introduced catastrophes to punish man for his sins,
for these were the biblical and geological models
upon which monarchical theory was based. In 1789,
on the eve of the French Revolution, accompanied by
Erasmus Darwin and later by Jean Baptiste Lamarck
and Simon LaPlace, the Scottish liberal geologist,
James Hutton, published his Theory of the
Earth, in which he attempted to demonstrate that
Nature was not governed by a divine monarch, but by
fixed geological laws of volcanic uplift and erosive
weathering. Hutton's friend, Adam Smith, was at the
same time arguing in favor of a laissez-faire
economic policy, in which paternal monarchical power
was again eliminated in favor of a free-ranging
liberalism.
"Some Judicious persons, who were present at Geneva
during the troubles which lately convulsed that
city," the Reverend William Paley writes in a
counter attack against the new liberalism in his
The Principles of Moral and Political
Philosophy (5th edition, corrected 1793),
"thought they perceived in the contentions there
carrying on, the operation of that political theory
which the writings of Rousseau, and the unbounded
esteem in which these writings are held by his
countrymen, had diffused amongst the people.
Throughout the political disputes," he goes on,
"that have within these few years taken place in
Great Britain, in her sister Kingdom, and in her
foreign dependencies, it was impossible not to
observe, in the language of party, in the resolution
of popular meetings, in debate, in conversations, in
the general strain of those fugitive and diurnal
addresses to the public, which such occasions call
forth, the prevalency of the ideas of civil
authority which are displayed in the work of Mr.
Locke. Such doctrines," he continues, "are not
without effect; and it is of practical importance to
have the principles from which the obligation of
social union, and an extent of civil obedience are
derived, rightly explained and well understood. "
Paley then went on to explain them not only in the
ensuing 567 pages of his Moral and Political
Philosophy but also in the two volumes of a
much longer work on Natural Theology in which the
cosmological foundations of monarchy were once again
reiterated.
The "cause," then, to which Babbage was referring
when he wrote Lyell ("I think any argument from such
a reported radical as myself would only injure the
cause") was that of discrediting Paley and the other
Tory Monarchists through an attack on its geological
and theological foundations.
The Cause
After the Napoleonic Wars, England had fallen into a
severe depression. Governmental demands for
military supplies ceased, and there was no market
for British goods overseas. To add to the distress
and general unemployment nearly 400,000 troops were
demobilized with no place to go. In order to protect
the British farmer from imports of cheap grain, the
corn laws were instituted in 1815 preventing the
import of grain until the price had reached 80
shillings a quarter, a price so high that laborers
were starving without being able to pay it.
Although the corn laws were passed to protect the
British farmer, they had a devastating effect on
British Industry and on the towns of the industrial
midlands. High food prices drove not only the
workers into starvation, but also small businesses
into bankruptcy. The Tory solution to the problem
was to advise the lower classes not to breed so
copiously. Still the towns of the industrial
midlands continued to grow--mostly, as it turns out,
from an influx of the younger sons and daughters of
poor farmers. Manchester, for instance, was a small
town of 4,000 in 1688. A century later it was ten
times that size, and by the time Lyell published his
Principles of Geology, it was approaching
half a million, most of whose inhabitants lived in
wretched conditions. Malthus classified towns like
Manchester along with wars, famines and plagues as a
natural check on the population because the death
rate was so high.
On August 16, 1819, a crowd of unemployed,
underpaid, and underfed inhabitants of Manchester
gathered at St. Peter's field to hear a speech on
Parliamentary Reform and repeal of the corn laws.
The local militia from the countryside, fearing a
rebellion, attempted to arrest the speaker. In the
fight that ensued, several were killed and many
injured. The monarchist Tory government instituted
the "Six Acts," which curtailed the right of free
speech and forbade the training of persons in the
use of arms. England was on the verge of
revolution-the liberal industrial midlands versus
the Tory monarchists; but the memory of the French
Revolution was still fresh among the middle class.
They wanted reform in Parliament, not riots, but to
reform Parliament meant answering Paley's arguments,
and this entailed destroying Paley's Natural
Theology.
Paley had argued that sovereignty descends from God
to the King; the people are his subjects. Because
Parliament is an advisory body, if the king is
content with its advice, then there is no need to
reform it. The fact that Parliament did not
represent the present distribution of people in
England, Paley argued, was irrelevant since
sovereignty did not stem from the people to begin
with. Sovereignty descended from God.
Paley's arguments were amazingly effective. His
treatise on Moral and Political
Philosophy, in which he argued that "it is the
will of God that the established government be
obeyed," was required for memorization (one had to
know his basic argument) before students could
graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. The only way the
liberals from the midlands could get Parliament
reformed was to demonstrate that the scientific
foundations of Paley's natural theology were false,
and this meant destroying diluvial geology and catastrophism.
In 1825, Lyell's liberal cohort George Poulett
Scrope (1797 - 1876) published his Considerations
on Volcanos in which he transformed the
arguments of the Tories: every time they ascribed a
natural event to God, Scrope ascribed the same event
to a volcano, thereby attempting to revive the
geological theories of James Hutton. So perfect
were the laws of volcanic uplift and erosion which
God had created at the beginning of time eons ago,
Hutton and Scrope argued, that no more had been seen
of God since, nor was there any need of him to run
the affairs of the universe any more than was there
need of a king to interfere with the natural and
intrinsic laws of economics and of society.
Scrope's book was too radical for the London
Geological Society at that time, and it was
dismissed without a hearing. Scrope, the son of a
wealthy London merchant, bought himself a seat in
Parliament and pursued the cause by more direct
means. But without a cosmological proof that
monarchy was unnatural and that sovereignty belonged
to the people, the liberals remained relatively powerless.
Undaunted by Scrope's failure, the young Whig lawyer
Charles Lyell now tried his hand at destroying the
geological foundation of monarchical theory. In his
Principles of Geology he took a much more
subtle line than had Scrope. In the 100-page
introduction to the Principles, Lyell argued
not so much that the diluvial theory was wrong, as
that it was mythological and impeded the "progress"
of geology. In the first volume he went on at great
length concerning the forces of erosion and the
effects of volcanic uplift in what was a brilliant
avoidance of all evidence of catastrophism. It was
just what the moderates were looking for. They
rallied around Lyell and elected him secretary
first, and then president of the Geological Society.
"By espousing you," Scrope wrote to Lyell on April
12, 1831, "the conclave have decidedly and
irrevocably attached themselves to the liberal
side, and sanctioned in the most direct and open
manner the principal things advocated. Had they on
the contrary made their election of a Mosaic
geologist like Buckland or Conybeare, the orthodox
would have immediately taken their cue from them,
and for a quarter of a century to come, it would
have been heresy to deny the excavations of valleys
by the deluge and atheism to talk of anything but
chaos have lived before Adam. At the same time I
have a malicious satisfaction," Scrope continues,
"in seeing the minority of Bigwigs swallow the new
doctrine upon compulsion rather than from taste and
shall enjoy their wry faces as they find themselves
obliged to take it like physics to avoid the peril
of worse evils. I feel some satisfaction in this."
In this day and age when geology is far removed from
religion and politics and when political issues are
settled by election rather than at meetings of
geological societies, it is difficult for us to
understand the extent to which the social shift in
world view which took place not only in geology but
in astronomy and in natural history was related to
the Great Reform movement of 1832. All were part of
the far more general shift in world view from
paternalism to liberalism, but the persons
responsible for engineering this shift were very
conscious of what they were doing. "It is a great
treat to have taught our section-hunting quarry men,
that two thick volumes may be written on geology
without once using the word
A stratum,"
Scrope wrote to Lyell on September 29, 1832, after
Lyell's second volume appeared. "If anyone had said
so five years back, how he would have been scoffed
at." Just as the conservatives had refused a
hearing to the Huttonian camp earlier, now the
liberals pulled the same tactics when they got into
power. The stronghold of catastrophism lay in a
stratigraphy where unconformity and nonconformities,
to say nothing of massive conglomerates, told of
wide-ranging geological disasters in the past.
Lyell, like Scrope before him, simply suppressed the
evidence which did not fit in with his doctrines,
and once he was voted into power, the catastrophists
found it increasingly difficult to publish their
research.
The liberal takeover of the geological society and
the suppression of evidence favoring the
catastrophist position did not come about
over-night. Rather there was a slow assimilation of
catastrophist data until there was virtually nothing
left to the theory as a whole. When, in 1839, Louis
Agassiz attempted to argue in favor of catastrophism
with his theory of ice ages, the uniformitarians
simply adopted all his evidence, but reinterpreted
it in uniformitarian terms. Thus the data did not
change, but the Gestalt by which that data was
organized and given coherence was transformed from
catastrophism to uniformitarianism, just as the
social structure of England was changed from Tory
Paternalism in which sovereignty descended from God
down to the King, to the new liberalism in which
sovereignty ascended up from the people through
Parliament to its ministers.
Ironically enough, the political battle which
underlay the catastrophist -uniformitarian debate of
1832 is now long over, but owing to the
paradigmization of science, the uniformitarian
Gestalt is still assiduously cultivated at
universities and in professional geological
societies. The
A cause"
for which Babbage, Scrope, and Lyell were fighting
is now long since over, and we should feel free to
look again at the geological evidence itself,
which, if the truth be told, provides ample evidence
for catastrophism, as it always has.
Afterword
In 1905, Physics had been in a dilemma; some of the
evidence from optics indicated that light moved in
waves, other evidence indicated that it moved in
particles. The two concepts seemed contradictory,
but Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were able to
show mathematically that the two concepts were
actually complementary and provided us with a fuller
picture of reality if we accepted them both.
Geology is today perhaps in the same situation. We
have inherited from our ancestors the idea that
either catastrophism must be correct or
uniformitarianism must be correct but not both. The
reason they put this either/or proposition was
political. Either sovereignty belonged to God and
the King, or it belonged to the people, it could not
belong to both; therefore Geology had either to go
with the Tories to catastrophism, or to the liberals
with uniformitarianism; it could not go both ways.
Today we no longer have to worry about that; from
the evidence of Geology, it seems quite clear that
both theories are correct. The normal course of
events is indeed as Lyell describes it: gentle
uplift and slow erosion, but there is also ample
evidence that Velikovsky is correct as well and that
the earth has indeed been subject to severe
catastrophes as he has so convincingly argued in his
Earth in Upheaval.
In this paper I have attempted to make five major
points: first, the London Geological Society, which gave
birth to the uniformitarian paradigm, did not originally
consist of a group of practicing field geologists, but
was comprised of gentlemen, members of Parliament,
clergymen and lawyers who were primarily concerned with
the political and theological implications of Geology at
the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832 when the
concept of monarchical sovereignty was being challenged
by the Whigs and defended by the Tories. Second, that
the London Geological Society had been split into two
camps with the Tory catastrophists prevailing before
1832 and liberal Whigs, under the leadership of Lyell,
Scrope and, later, Darwin, taking over in the second
quarter of the century. Third, that "uniformitarianism"
was promoted by the liberals as part of "the cause" to
undermine the theoretical foundations of monarchy and
was not derived from field research. Fourth, because
the Tories were using repressive tactics in politics to
prevent the reform of Parliament, the social tension
spilled over into the geological debate causing the
intense interest in geology in the 1820's and 1830's and
the exponential growth of the newly founded London
Geological Society. The liberals, by seizing control of
the London Geological Society before the Reform Bill was
passed, presaged what was soon to follow in the
political arena. And, fifth, once in control, the
liberals attempted to cement their hegemony by
repressing the catastrophists and by assimilating their
data. In the ensuing years of the 19th century, geology
became fully professional and dogmatic. It became a
scientific heresy to believe in catastrophic theory; and
many years later, the reaction of the scientific
community was one of instinctive repression, not because
Velikovsky was wrong, but because it basically feared
that he may be right.
. This
paper was first presented in May of 1974 at the
Symposium titled Velikovsky and Cultural
Amnesia held at the Univ. of Lethbridge
(Alberta).
. The
"Discourses" are three: "A Discourse on the Arts
and Sciences...... A Discourse on the
Originality of Inequality," and "A Discourse on
Political Economy."
Mikamar
Publishing