THE DISCOVERY OF TIME

This surveys, chronologically, the development of man's sense of history-- his slow recognition that present experience is grounded in past time which, in large part, has structured it. All theories from primitive mythmakers, Greek philosophers, medieval religionists, early historiographers (Vico, Kant, Herder), to the modern cosmologists, theories which describe historical process and its character, are explained. Of course it is geological and biological science which has given the most concrete evidence of the nature of time's workings in organic and organic evolution. Yet the major problem remains because now theory seems to have come full circle back to Heraclitus' belief that realism is in flux, with nothing, not even natural ""laws,"" immutable. This is the third volume in the Nuffield Foundation's Ancestry of Science series. The first two volumes were The Fabric of the Heavens and The Architecture of Matter by the same authors, useful contributions.