The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 15

The test of any organizing principle is its success in rendering specifics, not
its status as abstract generality. Time's arrow and time's cycle unlocked
particulars of each text, and permitted me to grasp the central character of
themes usually cast aside as peripheral, or not acknowledged at all.
For Burnet, I could apprehend his text (and his frontispiece) as a battleground
of internal struggle and uneasy union between the two metaphors. I could
understand the deeper unity between his view of the earth and Steno's in the
Prodromus —though these two texts are usually read as opposite poles of the
inappropriate archaic/ modern dichotomy. For Hutton, I finally grasped his
vision as time's cycle in its purest form, and I discovered a key difference
between him and his Boswell, John Playfair—a distinction centered on the
dichotomy of arrows and cycles, but previously invisible without this
context. For Lyell, I understood the deeper themes behind his method for
dating Tertiary rocks, and knew at last why he had made a mere technique
the centerpiece of a theoretical treatise. And I grasped the reason for his later
allegiance to evolution—as a conservative strategy of minimal retreat from
his vision of time's cycle, not as the testimony of a deputy in Darwin's radical
crusade.
In a larger sense, time's arrow and time's cycle became the central focus of
this topic when I recognized that Hutton's and Lyell's preference for deep
time arose, first and foremost, from their com- mitment to the unfamiliar
view of time's cycle, and not (as the myth professes) from superior
knowledge of rocks in the field. We, in our world of time's arrow, will never
understand the twin "fathers" of our profession unless we recover their vision
and their metaphor.
Fourth, time's arrow and time's cycle is, if you will, a "great" dichotomy
because each of its poles captures, by its essence, a theme so central to
intellectual (and practical) life that Western people who hope to understand
history must wrestle intimately with both—for time's arrow is the
intelligibility of distinct and irrevers-