Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 49

that topic is monstrous and obscene—and he loses it permanently on a
shelf in the stacks of the Argentine National Library.
The trader's epitome of this impossible book presents the same dilemma that
Burnet avoids by rejecting the strict cycle and arguing for narrative: "If space
is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at
any point in time."
If the arrow by itself makes time unintelligible, but if nature is formless, and
therefore incomprehensible, without cycles, then what is to be done? Burnet
argues that cycles must turn, but that phases repeat with crucial differences
each time. The material substrate does not change (for the same stuff cycles),
but resulting forms alter, often in a definite direction so that each repetition
passes with distinctive and identifiable differences. We can, in other words,
know where we are—and Borges's paradox is resolved. Burnet returns to
Aristotle's error and illustrates, with his favorite metaphor of the stage, why
we must incorporate elements of directional change at each repetition. The
theorists of time's cycle assert
the identity, or sameness, if I may so say, of the worlds, succeeding one
another. They are made indeed of the same lump of matter, but they supposed
them to return also in the same form . . . So as the second world would be but
a bare repetition of the former, without any variety or diversity . . . As a play
acted over again, upon the same stage, and to the same auditory. (249)
Burnet then brands time's cycle in its pure form as "a manifest error . . .
easily rectified" (249). Both nature and scripture impose a vector of history
upon any set of cycles, guaranteeing that no phase can repeat exactly the
corresponding part of a former cycle:
For, whether we consider the nature of things; the earth after a dissolution; by
fire or by water, could not return into the same form and fashion it had
before; or whether we consider providence, it would in no ways suit with the
divine wisdom and justice to bring upon the stage again those very scenes,
and that