The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 14

for understanding geology's greatest contribution to human thought. I do not
make this claim a priori or on principle, but for four specific reasons that I
defend throughout this work.
First, time's arrow and time's cycle may be too simple and too limited, but it
was at least their dichotomy—the context recognized by Burnet, Hutton, and
Lyell themselves, rather than an anachronistic or moralistic contrast imposed
by whiggish histories of text- book cardboard (observation/speculation, or
uniformity/catastrophe).
Second, we have lost this well-articulated context of their own understanding
because the pole of time's cycle has become so unfamiliar today that we no
longer recognize its guiding sway upon our heroes (especially when we view
them merely as superior observers with an essentially modern cast of mind).
Moreover, time's cycle embodies basic principles of interpretation that we
need to recover (or at least not dismiss as empirically inadequate). Eliade,
great student of myth, lauded the reintroduction of time's cycle into some
modern theories not because he could judge their truth but because he so well
understood the deeper meaning of this metaphor:
The reappearance of cyclical theories in contemporary thought is pregnant
with meaning. Incompetent as we are to pass judgment upon their validity,
we shall confine ourselves to observing that the formulation, in modern
terms, of an archaic myth betrays at least the desire to find a meaning and a
transhistorical justification for historical events. (1954, 147)
Third, I became convinced about the fundamental character of this dichotomy
because it unlocked (at least for me) the central meaning of three great
documents that I had read many times but never understood in a unified way.
Parts that I had viewed as disparate fell into a piece; I was able to reorder
false alignments designated by the whiggish dichotomies, and to read these
texts with a better taxonomy that expressed the authors' own visions.