Borges's Dilemma and Hutton's Motto

I designated as Borges's dilemma the incomprehensibility that true eternity imposes upon our understanding (see page 48). Hutton had to resolve this logical conundrum, since he believed so strongly that Newtonian science required a pure vision of time's cycle for the mechanics of earthly processes, and that no event could therefore gain distinction in history. Hutton avoided Borges's dilemma with a brilliant argument that doubled as incisive methodology about what science can and cannot do. He held that time's cycle governs the earth only while it operates under the regime of natural laws now in force. These laws prescribe the cycle of the world machine and therefore provide no insight about beginnings and ends. Logic demands both beginnings and ends, but ultimate origins lie outside the realm of science. Some higher power established the current regime of natural laws at an unknowable time in the distant past, and will terminate this reign at an undetermined moment in the future—but science cannot deal with such ultimates.

Thus, Hutton chose his most famous words with consummate care, though posterity has often misread him as an exponent of infinite time. We see "no vestige of a beginning"—but the earth had an inception now erased from geological evidence by the cycling of its products through so many subsequent worlds. We discern "no prospect of an end" because the current regime of natural law cannot undo our planet—but the earth will terminate, or change to a different status, when higher powers choose to abolish the current regime. With one stroke, Hutton both gained the benefit and avoided the dilemma of time's cycle in its pure form. He acquired the virtue (as he saw it) of a perfect, repeating system with no peculiarities of history to threaten the hegemony of a timeless set of causes; and he resolved Borges's dilemma by relegating beginnings and ends, the anchors that comprehension requires, to a realm outside science. As Playfair wrote in summary: "Thus he arrived at the new and sublime conclusion, which represents nature as having provided for a constant succession of land at the surface of the