Times arrow times cycle. A comparison of two quotes i chose
Epigraph “We must not only consider how things are but how they came to be so. ‘Tis pleasant to look upon a tree in the summer, covered with green leaves, decked with blossoms, or laden with fruit, and casting a pleasing shade under its spreading boughs, but to consider how this tree with all its furniture, sprang from a little seed; how nature shaped it, and fed it, in its infancy and growth; added new parts and still advanced it by little and little, till it came to this greatness and perfection, this, methinks, is another sort of pleasure, more rational, less common.. So to view this earth, as it is now complete, distinguished into the several orders of bodies, of which it consists, every one perfect and admirable in its kind, this is truly delightful, and a very good entertainment of the mind, but to see all these in their first seeds, as I may so say; to take in pieces this frame of nature and melt it down into its first principles, and then to observe how the divine wisdom wrought all these things out of confusion into order, and out of simplicity, into that beautiful composition we not see them in; this, methinks, is another kind of joy, which pierceth the mind more deep, and is more satisfactory.”
This paragraph was pulled from the second chapter, page 45 continuing onto page 46, of
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, written by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was a Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist and Historian of Science. This book is a compilation of many lectures that Gould studied and analyzed, that came from a Hebrew University in Jerusalem that were put together and published in 1987 by Harvard University Press. The aforementioned paragraph was originally written by Thomas Burnet. Burnet was an English theologian and writer on the scientific theory of how the universe was created. He lived from 1635edusson.com1715. Burnet was a Reverend for a period of time; a prominent Anglican Clergyman who became the cabinet officer and private chaplain for King William III. Burnet turned to science as he traveled formulating theories about earth’s history. He went on to write Telloris Theoria Sacra which was published in 1680 in Latin and then republished in 1690 in english. This was his most known work, which the quoted paragraph above was pulled from. Gould did not support Burnet as a scientist (this word was not used to describe their field in that time), but appreciated his ‘retrospective view of earth’s history’.