The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 18

documents because they embody a breadth of vision and passion that cannot
recur in quite the same way. Finally, something so basic and fundamental
that we often neglect to say it: the study of major texts by great thinkers
needs no rationale beyond the pure pleasure that such intellectual power
provides. The main motivation for my strategy was simple joy.
Although my basic procedure might seem restrictive, I have tried to provide
expansion by several subthemes. In particular, if texts are unified by a central
logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the
ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only for aesthetic or commercial
value. Primates are visual animals, and (particularly in science) illustration
has a language and set of conventions all its own. Rudwick (1976), in his
most brilliant article, has developed this theme, but scholars have been slow
to add another dimension to their traditional focus upon words alone. Within
my theme of metaphor and vision brought to a world of observation, pictorial
summary assumes an especially vital role. I found that pictures provided a
key to my understanding of time's arrow and time's cycle as the primary field
of intellectual struggle. When I apprehended the complexity of Burner's
frontispiece, I possessed the outline of this topic. I shall therefore begin each
substantive chapter by discussing a crucial picture—usually misunderstood
or ignored—that captures the metaphor of time favored by each protagonist.
When Goethe, as an old man, attended the greatest debate of another
dichotomy in 1830, he recognized that the arguments in 1'Academic des
sciences might be more important in the long run than the political revolution
then engulfing the streets of Paris. For Cuvier and Geoffroy, France's greatest
biologists, were thrashing out the central dichotomy of structural versus
functional approaches to form (not fighting the nascent conflict of evolution
versus creation, as a subsequent tradition of anachronism would assert).
Goethe understood from the core of his own practice that art and science
could be adjacent facets of one intellectual ensemble; he knew the passion of
science as a struggle of ideas, not only a