The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 17

understand that Burnet's rationale cannot be comprehended with- out the
context of England in the Glorious Revolution (which intervened between the
publication of his treatises on the earth's past and future), and especially his
battles with radical millenarians of his day. I also appreciate that to discuss
James Hutton without the Edinburgh of David Hume, Adam Smith, and
James Watt is (to cite the tale of another Scotsman) to rip a child untimely
from its mother's womb.
Still, I see some value in the venerable method of explication. The social and
psychological sources of a text are manifold—the reasons why it exists at all,
and why it espouses one view of the world rather than another. But truly
great works also have an internal logic that invites analysis in its own terms—
as a coherent argument contained within itself by brilliance of vision and
synthesis of careful construction. All the pieces fit once you grasp this central
logic.
I would go further and argue that the salutary theme of social context has
sometimes driven us away from the logic of documents, for we decompose
parts into disparate aspects of a broader setting and sometimes forget that
they also cohere inside the work in an almost organic way—as if the covers
of a book work like the skin of an organism. (We must strive to understand
any creature's ecology from the outside, but morphologists, from Goethe to
Geoffrey to Owen to D'Arcy Thompson, have also understood the value of
structural analysis from within.) Great arguments have a universality (and a
beauty) that transcends time—and we must not lose internal coherence as we
strive to understand the social and psychological whys and wherefores.
I don't think that we can be accused of unreconstructed whiggery if we seek
guidance and modern understanding from great arguments of the past—for
examples of true wisdom are few and far between, and we need all the cases
we can get. Also, as I argue above, the discovery of time was so central, so
sweet, and so provocative, that we cannot hope to match its import again.
The texts of this discovery will remain our most precious and instructive