rocks in the field. Indeed, I shall show that their visions stand prior-logically, psychologically, and in the ontogeny of their thoughts—to their attempts at empirical support. I shall also show that Thomas Burnet, villain of Whig history, tried to balance the two poles of a dichotomy that Hutton and Lyell read as victory for one side—and that, in many ways, Burner's reading commends itself more to our current attention. Deep time, in other words, imposed a vision of reality rooted in ancient traditions of Western thought, as much as it reflected a new understanding of rocks, fossils, and strata.

This crucial dichotomy embodies the deepest and oldest themes in Western thought about the central subject of time: linear and circular visions, or time's arrow and time's cycle.

Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle

We live embedded in the passage of time—a matrix marked by all possible standards of judgment: by immanent things that do not appear to change; by cosmic recurrences of days and seasons; by unique events of battles and natural disasters; by an apparent di- rectionality of life from birth and growth to decrepitude, death, and decay. Amidst this buzzing complexity, interpreted by different cultures in so many various ways, Judeo-Christian traditions have struggled to understand time by juggling and balancing two ends of a primary dichotomy about the nature of history. In our traditions, these poles have received our necessary attention because each captures an unavoidable theme in the logic and psychology of how we understand history—the twin requirements of uniqueness to mark moments of time as distinctive, and lawfulness to establish a basis for intelligibility.

At one end of the dichotomy—I shall call it time's arrow—history is an irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events. Each moment occupies its own distinct position in a temporal series, and all