The truly remarkable thing about this period of the 'discovery of time' through geology, however, was that the past was scientifically safeguarded precisely at a moment when one of the greatest social experiments in Europe began: the phase of intensive industrialization and its side effects, whereby the social present and future of millions of people was swept into the swirling current of commencing modernization and profoundly shaken.
In view of this coincidence, it also becomes less astonishing that the conflicts between geology and established religion over a literal interpretation of the story of the Creation were limited. Of course, there was a small minority which insisted on it, but it stood no chance in the face of a pragmatic science for which even a concept like creation'caused no difficulties, even if it could not be precisely translated into scientific terms. Creation'was to prove problematic only where, as in the case of Lamarck, no creative activity was allowed to exist any longer behind the natural process of evolution, before fully flaring up in the controversy surrounding Darwin's theory of evolution. The harmlessness and casualness with which geology asserted its conception of time in the face of religion in the first half of the nineteenth century did not hold good, however, for other relations of this science to the society of its time. The establishing and ordering of the strata of the earth had highly practical economic significance, for it formed the prerequisite for the discovery and extraction of raw materials which were imperative for incipient industrialization. One of the protagonists of the Great Devonian Controversy', Murchison, was adviser to the tsar of Russia, for example, and convinced him of the futility of looking for coal in a Silurian rock stratum.
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
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