Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER ONE
The Discovery of
Deep Time
Deep Time
Sigmund Freud remarked that each major science has made one signal
contribution to the reconstruction of human thought—and that each step in
this painful progress had shattered yet another facet of an original hope for
our own transcendent importance in the universe:
Humanity has in course of time had to endure from the hand of science two
great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our
earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system
of a magnitude hardly conceivable . . . The second was when biological
research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially
created and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.
(In one of history's least modest pronouncements, Freud then stated that his
own work had toppled the next, and perhaps last, pedestal of this unhappy
retreat—the solace that, though evolved from a lowly ape, we at least
possessed rational minds.)
But Freud omitted one of the greatest steps from his list, the bridge between
spatial limitation of human dominion (the Galilean revolution), and our
physical union with all "lower" creatures (the Darwinian revolution). He
neglected the great temporal limitation
1
Search WWH ::




Custom Search