The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 10

rocks in the field. Indeed, I shall show that their visions stand prior-logically,
psychologically, and in the ontogeny of their thoughts—to their attempts at
empirical support. I shall also show that Thomas Burnet, villain of Whig
history, tried to balance the two poles of a dichotomy that Hutton and Lyell
read as victory for one side—and that, in many ways, Burner's reading
commends itself more to our current attention. Deep time, in other words,
imposed a vision of reality rooted in ancient traditions of Western thought, as
much as it reflected a new understanding of rocks, fossils, and strata.
This crucial dichotomy embodies the deepest and oldest themes in Western
thought about the central subject of time: linear and circular visions, or time's
arrow and time's cycle.
Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle
We live embedded in the passage of time—a matrix marked by all possible
standards of judgment: by immanent things that do not appear to change; by
cosmic recurrences of days and seasons; by unique events of battles and
natural disasters; by an apparent di- rectionality of life from birth and growth
to decrepitude, death, and decay. Amidst this buzzing complexity, interpreted
by different cultures in so many various ways, Judeo-Christian traditions
have struggled to understand time by juggling and balancing two ends of a
primary dichotomy about the nature of history. In our traditions, these poles
have received our necessary attention because each captures an unavoidable
theme in the logic and psychology of how we understand history—the twin
requirements of uniqueness to mark moments of time as distinctive, and
lawfulness to establish a basis for intelligibility.
At one end of the dichotomy—I shall call it time's arrow—history is an
irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events. Each moment occupies its own
distinct position in a temporal series, and all