‘In relation to the history of organic life
on earth,’ writes a modern biologist, ‘the
paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute
something like two seconds at the close of
a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the
history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth
of the last second of the last hour.’ 
The present, which, as a model of Messianic
time, comprises the entire history of mankind
in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly
with the stature which the history of mankind
has in the universe.
