ABSTRACT
The modern sciences of human affairs became professionalized investigations during the course of the nineteenth century. The American and French Revolutions had then already taken place and the industrial revolution was in full swing. Compared with the biological sciences, as these developed during the same century, one can point to two similarities. Both shared a preparatory eighteenth-century prehistory in wh ich temporalization as an historical process has pIayed a major roie. By "temporalization" we refer to the subjection of things and processes induding human thought and conduct to the uniform, linear, quantified time of the mechanical dock. Linear, Absolute Newtonian Time, had come to rule triumphant during the nineteenth century (Buckley, 1966). H. Meyerhoff points out that in the nineteenth century "all the sciences-biology, anthropology, psychology, even economics and politics-became 'historical' sciences in the sense that they recognized and employed a historical, genetic, or evolutionary method" (1955, p. 97). To the list of sciences he enumerated one can add linguistics and such natural sciences as geology and cosmology; they were busy formulating secular ac counts of the development of languages, the earth and the universe as natural events and processes taking place in time (Lovejoy, 1936). The belles-Iettres of the Victorian period reflect a similar concern with time. "The Victorians," writes J. H. Buckley in The Triumph oi Time, "at least as far as their prose and verse reveal them, were preoccupied almost obsessively with time and all the devices that measure time's flight" (1966, pp. 1-3). "Time's flight," alludes to another aspect of the nineteenth-century concern with time: a preoccupation with death
(Morley, 1971). Personified, death even shows up in Alice in Wonderland: "If you knew Time as weIl as I do," the Mad Hatter teIls Aliee, "you wouldn't talk ab out wasting it. It's him" (CarroIl, 1865).
