"The shift toward a linear time conception, a confutation against (instead of a development from) the age-old cyclic time conception, did not occur suddenly and lasted well into the nineteenth century. ...Attention had clearly drifted away from seeking an eternally valid order toward a focus on change; truth had now ceased to lie in an unchanging order of things—rather, it tended to be regarded as dependent on process. Gerald Whitrow has put the matter succinctly, that in the nineteenth century " interest was transferred from the 'thing completed' to the genetic process, that is, from 'being' to 'becoming.' ""