Look back at history — at how kingdoms and governments have changed over and over again. You can also see the future, because it will all be the same kind of thing. Nothing can break away from this pattern that has already started with what happens now. So it makes no difference whether you watch life for forty years or ten thousand years. What more would you see?
To look back upon things of former ages, as upon the manifold changes and conversions of several monarchies and commonwealths. We may also foresee things future, for they shall all be of the same kind; neither is it possible that they should leave the tune, or break the concert that is now begun, as it were, by these things that are now done and brought to pass in the world. It comes all to one therefore, whether a man be a spectator of the things of this life but forty years, or whether he see them ten thousand years together: for what shall he see more?