With as much truth as Hutton, Kant could say, “I take things just as I find them at present, and, from these, I reason with regard to that which must have been.”  Like Hutton, he is never tired of pointing out that “in Nature there is wisdom, system, and consistency.”  And, as in these great principles, so in believing that the cosmos has a reproductive operation “by which a ruined constitution may be repaired,” he forestalls Hutton; while, on the other hand, Kant is true to science.  He knows no bounds to geological speculation but those of the intellect.  He reasons back to a beginning of the present state of things; he admits the possibility of an end.

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.  But it is proper to remark that each of the latter has kept alive the tradition of precious truths.

CATASTROPHISM has insisted upon the existence of a practically unlimited bank of force, on which the theorist might draw; and it has cherished the idea of the development of the earth from a state in which its form, and the forces which it exerted, were very different from those we now know.  That such difference of form and power once existed is a necessary part of the doctrine of evolution.

UNIFORMITARIANISM, on the other hand, has with equal justice insisted upon a practically unlimited bank of time, ready to discount any quantity of hypothetical paper.  It has kept before our eyes the power of the infinitely little, time being granted, and has compelled us to exhaust known causes, before flying to the unknown.

To my mind there appears to be no sort of necessary theoretical antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism.  On the contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity.  Let me illustrate my case by analogy.  The working of a clock is a model of uniform action; good time-keeping means uniformity of action.  But the striking of the clock is essentially a catastrophe; the hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water; and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular periods, never twice alike, in the intervals, force, or number of its blows.  Nevertheless, all these irregular, and apparently lawless, catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action; and we might have two schools of clock-theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.