The Rise of Uniformitarian Thought Every scientific discipline has moved rapidly toward a materialistic interpretation of reality. The first major study of geology from the modern materialistic viewpoint was James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795). In direct contrast to the prevailing view of earlier geologists, Hutton believed that the earth had never experienced any major geologically significant catastrophes. The mountains, he suggested, had been uplifted at a rate of only millimeters per millennia.