Archives: Book Chapters

1. Introduction. The Rebounding of Evolution

A year ago I argued in this journal that, observed in a certain aspect (the truly scientific aspect, in my view), the human social phenomenon affords evidence that the evolution of Life on earth, far from having come to a stop, is on the contrary now entering a new phase.(Cf. chapter x, The Formation of the Noosphere. Revue des Questions Scientifiques, January 1947.)

I maintained that, contrary to the commonly expressed or tacitly accepted view, the era of active evolution did not end with the appearance of the human zoological type: for by virtue of his acquirement of the gift of individual reflection Man displays the extraordinary quality of being able to totalize himself collectively upon himself, thus extending on a planetary scale the fundamental vital process which causes matter, under Certain conditions, to organize itself in elements which are ever more complex physically, and psychologically ever more centrated. Thus (provided always that we accept the organic nature of the social phenomenon) we see being woven around us, beyond any unity hitherto acknowledged or even foreseen by biology, the network and consciousness of a Noosphere(It should be noted here that by its nature as a centrated, ‘reflective’ collectivity, the Noosphere, while occupying the same spatial dimensions as the Biosphere, differs from it profoundly in its structure and quality of vital completion. Whereas the Biosphere in its essence is complexity linked but divergent and diffused, the Noosphere combines in itself the properties of a planetary zone (or sphere) and those of a sort of higher individuality endowed with something in the nature of a super-consciousness.)

Following upon this I argued that biological evolution is not only being extended beneath our gaze through the development of the human social group, but that it gives the impression of rebounding upon itself. Although in the pre-human stages of evolution the gradual growth of consciousness in animals (see Section 2, below) does not appear to have had any appreciable effect on the course or speed of their zoological evolution, from the time of Man the evolutionary mechanism undergoes a radical change. For Man, by the act of ‘noospherically’ concentrating himself upon himself, not only becomes reflectively aware of the ontological current on which he is borne, but also gains control of certain of the springs of energy which dictate this advance: above all, collective springs, in so far as he consciously realizes the value, biological efficiency and creative nature of social organization; but also individual springs m as much as, through the collective work of science, he feels himself to be on the verge of acquiring the power of physicochemical control of the operations of heredity and morphogenesis in the depths of his own being. So we may say that since by a sort of chain-reaction consciousness, itself borne of complexity, finds itself in a position to bring about ‘artificially’ a further increase of complexity in its material dwelling (thus engendering or liberating a further growth of reflective consciousness, and so on . . .) the terrestrial evolution of Life, following its main axis of hominization, is not only completely altering the scale of its creations but is also entering an ‘explosive’ phase of an entirely new kind.

To me this appears the most satisfactory interpretation of the present state of Life on the surface of the earth; despite a regrettable recrudescence of racialism and nationalism which, impressive though it may be, and disastrous in its effect upon our private post-war lives, seems to have no scientific importance in the overall process: for the reason that any human tendency to fragmentation, regardless of its extent and origin, is clearly of an order of magnitude inferior to the planetary forces (geographic, demographic, economic and psychic) whose constantly and naturally growing pressure must sooner or later compel us willy-nilly to unite in some form of human whole organized on the basis of human solidarity.(See below, under ‘Conclusion’, remarks on ‘the critical lines of attraction’ between human particles.)

I shall not here attempt the perilous and fruitless task of prognosticating the stages, or the probable duration, or the terminal modalities of this inevitable unification of the human species. I will only recall that, by virtue of its convergent nature, hominization is scarcely conceivable (seen from the point at which we find ourselves) except as terminating, whatever road it follows, in a point of collective reflection where Mankind, having achieved within and around itself, technically and intellectually, the greatest possible coherence, will find itself raised to a higher critical point -- one of instability, tension, inter-penetration and metamorphosis -- coinciding, it would seem, with what for us are the phenomenal limits of the world.

But I wish, on the other hand, to insist upon certain consequences, of an immediately practical kind, ensuing from what I have called the ‘reflective rebound’ of evolution upon itself; consequences which all converge in a single generalized phenomenon -- namely, an irresistible functional incorporation of the psychic within the physico-chemical which recurs in the process of evolution from the time of the coming of Man.

Let me explain.

2. Emergence of the Finality

From the early beginnings of biological evolutionary theory, in the nineteenth century, two trends of thought have prevailed in scientific circles, developing side by side without mingling to any appreciable extent. No one doubts any longer that the world of living forms is the outcome of increasingly complex associations between the material corpuscles of which the universe is composed.(cf. Les Ètudes, May 1946 ) But how are we to envisage the generative mechanism of this ‘complexification’? It is very certain that matter on Earth is involved in a process which causes it to arrange itself starting with relatively simple elements, in ever larger and more complex units. But how are we to account for the origin and growth of this process of arrangement? Does it proceed from within, being conceived and ensued by psychic forces analogous to our human power of invention? Or does it simply come from outside, through the automatic selection of the more stable (or progressive) groupings among the immense number of combinations fortuitously and incessantly produced in Nature? It is curious to note how since the time of Lamarck and Darwin these two theories, while deepening in their respective ways, have become more sharply opposed. And with varying fortunes. Neo-Darwinism at present holds the ascendancy in the eyes of biologists, partly owing to a clearer and more statistically substantiated definition of ‘the fittest’, but principally because of the immense part, now recognized by modern genetics, played by the ‘action of large numbers’ in the formation of species.

It is to this conflict of opinion -- so apparently unyielding that one is inclined to wonder if it has not escaped from the realm of fact to become a simple clash of metaphysical or temperamental preferences -- that the hypothesis of a human rebounding of Evolution does, I believe, if Science will accept it, bring a solution and a satisfactory issue. And in the following manner.

That Man displays powers of invention in the creative use of his reflective faculties, that is to say, acts in accordance with an inner sense of purpose, is so apparent that no one has ever thought of denying it. But this fact remained suspended in a void, and without precise significance, while Man and his activities appeared to be isolated and as it were unattached in the bosom of Nature. The whole situation changes if, for reasons solidly bound up with the general structure of the Universe, we regard the process of hominization, with all its accoutrement of social and ‘artificial’ arrangements, as a prolongation and organic continuance of the grand cosmic phenomenon of the vitalization of matter. It then appears that if the neo-Darwinians are right (as they possibly and indeed probably are) in claiming that in the pre-human zones of Life there is nothing but the play of chance selection to be detected in the advance of the organized world, from the time of Man, on the contrary, it is the neo-Lamarckians who have the better of the argument, since at this level the forces of internal arrangement begin to be clearly manifest in the process of evolution. Which amounts to saying that biological purposiveness (as with so many other physical parameters of the universe) is not everywhere apparent in the living world, but that it only shows itself above a certain level -- its appearance coinciding, not with any particular stage between the Immense and the Infinitesimal but (as in the case of Life itself) with the attainment of a certain value in the ‘axis of complexities’. Below this critical point everything happens (perhaps?) as though the rise of Life were automatic. But above it the forces of free choice and inner direction come to light, and from this moment it is they that tend to take charge.

The point I wish to make is this. In the present state of hominization, as we see it in progress today, the statistical influence of chance and the part played by natural selection continue to be enormous. Compared with this immense passive field (the Darwinian) it may seem that the (Lamarckian) ground gained by our inventive efforts amounts to very little. But let us make no mistake about it. However slight the growth may be, however small the seed, it is precisely here that the power of renewal and rebounding of the living world is concentrated. Born under the appearance and the sign of Chance, it is only though reflective purposiveness, slowly acquired, that Life can henceforth hope to raise itself yet higher, by auto-evolution, in the twofold direction of greater complexity and fuller consciousness. Indeed, from now on all the hopes and future of the Universe are dependent on the propitious and stubborn working of this scarcely-born power of internal ‘self-arrangement.’

And this means, if we are not to regard the world as having become suddenly meaningless and contradictory, that we are entitled to attribute the value of experimental and physical reality to everything, within us and around us, which shows itself to be a necessary condition for the preservation and heightening in Man of his powers of invention and purposive thinking.

3. The Control and Preservation of Purposive Thinking

After a short period of untroubled proprietorship every new source of energy, as we know by experience, gives rise to two related problems, that of the limitations to be imposed on it and that of its preservation. The new force must not be allowed to get out of hand or to exhaust itself. The same applies (although we have thought less about it) to the source of energy abruptly released by Nature through Man which I have called the ‘force of purposive thinking.’ In its early forms human inventive power, as we still see in children, may be likened to a game. In those first manifestations of the power of reflective arrangement, everything appears simple, harmless and even beneficent, giving no hint of a moment to come when we can no longer go on playing. But as the phenomenon spreads and develops within a Mankind in process of becoming adult, what once looked like a game is suddenly found to be deadly earnest. The ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ by dint of fumbling has laid hands on forces of such power that he begins to be afraid of causing some disaster in Nature. And on the other hand, finding that by his discoveries he has acquired certain keys to the mastery of the world, he begins to realize that if he is to be equal to the situation he is bound, in his role of ‘quasi-demiurge’, to establish principles and a faith regarding the future and the value of the task that is henceforth imposed upon him.

Two roads, as I shall seek to show, by which certain energies and certain radiations, moral and mystical in their nature, inevitably make their appearance at the heart of the biological flux of evolution.

a The Moral Ordering of Invention. By ‘invention’ I mean to designate, in the widest sense of the word, everything in human activity which in one way or another contributes to the organico-social construction of the Noosphere and the development within it of new powers for the arrangement of Matter. From the ‘materialist’ point of view the progress of invention in this sense will be entirely governed by the pressure of external necessities, primarily economic. But it has become plain (in particular since the last war) that however urgent may be the planetary pressures driving us to unite, they cannot operate effectively in the long run except under certain psychic conditions, some of which arise out of the human neo-mystique to be discussed in the next paragraph, but the rest of which merely recall and re-express, with a precise biological foundation, the broad lines of the empirical and traditional Ethics which has been evolved in some ten millennia of civilization. It is enough for me to cite the twofold respect for things and for personality in the individual. Clearly whatever we may seek to build will crumble and turn to dust if the workmen are without conscience and professional integrity.(In this connection it is interesting to note the extent to which the lie (a relatively minor evil in more restricted groups) is fast becoming an inhibiting major vice in large social organisms, so that one might say that [like hatred -- and the taedium vitae] it tends to constitute a major obstacle to the formation of a Noosphere.) And it is even more abundantly clear that the greater our power of manipulating inert and living matter, the greater proportionately must be our anxiety not to falsify or outrage any part of the reflective conscience that surrounds us. Within a short space of time, owing to the acceleration of social and scientific developments, this twofold necessity has become so clearly urgent that to refer to it is to utter a commonplace. In recent years voices of alarm have been raised in many quarters pointing to the fast-growing gulf between technical and moral progress in the world today. The perils of the situation are plain to everyone. But do we yet fully recognize its deep significance?

Many people, I am convinced, still regard the higher morality which they look for and advocate as no more than a sort of compensation or external counter-balance, to be adroitly applied to the human machine from outside in order to off-set the overflow of Matter within it. But to me the phenomenon seems to go far deeper and to have far wider implications. The ethical principles which hitherto we have regarded as an appendage, superimposed more or less by our own free will upon the laws of biology, are now showing themselves -- not metaphorically but literally -- to be a condition of survival for the human race. In other words Evolution, in rebounding reflectively upon itself, acquires morality for the purpose of its further advance. In yet other terms, and whatever anyone may say, above a certain level, technical progress necessarily and functionally adds moral progress to itself. All this is surely proof that the two events are interdependent. In fact, the pursuit of human knowledge cannot be carried in concrete terms beyond a certain stage without this power of reflective arrangement becoming automatically charged with internal obligations which curb and direct it; while at the same time, as we shall see, it engenders around itself an entirely new atmosphere of spiritual needs.

b The Spiritual Nourishment of Human Endeavor. It is surprising to note, among the increasingly numerous theorists who, under the pressure of events, are beginning to speculate on the future of the human phenomenon, a sort of tacit agreement whereby vital energy is treated as though it were a constant, both in quality and quantity, like solar radiation or the force of gravity. This postulate of invariability seems at first sight to be admissible in the ‘Darwinian’ zones of Life, where the instinct of self-preservation predominates (this seeming by its nature to be more or less constant among organized beings), but it certainly loses all value in the ‘Lamarckian’ or human zone, where biological evolution, from being passive, becomes active in the pursuit of its purpose. As we know very well in ourselves, and as every leader of men has discovered, human creative energy, according to the degree of temperature generated within it (on a scale, that is to say, between enthusiasm and revulsion) can in a matter of instants leap ‘any distance short of infinity.’

If, therefore, we accept the idea of a reflective rebounding of evolution, it is not enough to reckon the future of the world in terms of reserves of mechanical energy and food supplies, or the probable longevity of the earth. As I said long ago,’ the evolutionary vigor of Mankind can wither away although it be surrounded by mountains of coal, oceans of petroleum and limitless stocks of corn; it can do so as surely as in a desert of ice, if Man should lose his impulse, or worse, develop a distaste for ever-increased growth ‘in complexity and consciousness’. With all respect to the materialist school, which still refuses to examine human biology, it is undeniable that in Man the external drive of Life tends to be transformed and turn inward to become an ardor for Life. Try to get productive work out of a workman, an engineer or a scientist who is ‘browned off’! So in the first place, if Evolution is to continue, it is this impetus which must be maintained in the heart of Man and encouraged to grow at all costs. Failing that upward current, almost nothing will move; whereas with it, everything will happen almost of its own accord in the higher zones, those that are truly progressive, of invention and discovery. But how are we to tap this deep, primordial well?

If the problem of sustaining this human impetus does not trouble the theorists I have referred to, it is, I suppose, because they assume that cases of revulsion will be as exceptional in the future as they have been in the past -- that a sufficient degree of physical health or euphoria will maintain vital pressure at a positive level, moderate but adequate, within the human mass. But is not this to beg the whole question? Not only have powers of reflection and invention been added to Life through hominization, but so has the formidable endowment of criticism. However exuberant our vitality, however rich and sanguine our temperament, it is already becoming impossible, and must inevitably become more so, for us to give ourselves wholly to any creative undertaking if we cannot justify it in rational terms. That is why if Man at this moment finds himself faced with the burden not merely of submitting to the evolutionary process but of consciously furthering it, we may be sure that he will seek, and rightly, to avoid the responsibility and pangs which this entails if the objective does not seem to be worth the effort. Which amounts to saying that the Universe, of psychic or psychological necessity (here they come to the same thing) must possess properties fulfilling the functional needs of reflective action. Otherwise apathy and even disgust will pervade the human mass, neutralizing or reversing every vigorous impulse at the heart of Life.

What and how many are these basic properties, these sine qua non conditions, which we are bound to postulate and presume to be incorporated in the structure of the surrounding world if Evolution, henceforth hominized, is to continue?

In our present state (or more exactly, stage) of psychic awareness it seems to me that they can be brought down to two, very closely related.

The first, as I have argued at length in my chapter on the Noosphere, is that in one way or another Consciousness, the flowering of Complexity, must survive the ultimate dissolution from which nothing can save the corporeal and planetary stem which bears it. From the moment when Evolution begins to think itself it can no longer live with or further itself except by knowing itself to be irreversible -- that is to say, immortal. For what point can there be in living with eyes fixed constantly and laboriously upon the future, if this future, even though it take the form of a Noosphere, must finally become a zero? Better surely to give up and die at once. In terms of this Absolute it is sacrifice, not egotism, that becomes odious and absurd. Irreversibility, then, is the first condition.

The second condition, no more than an amplification of the first, is that the irreversibility, thus revealed and accepted, must apply not to any one part, but to all that is deepest, most precious and most incommunicable in our consciousness. So that the process of vitalization in which we are engaged may be defined at its upper limit (whether we envisage the system as a whole or the destiny of each separate element within it) in terms of ‘ultra-personalization’. The necessity of this must be stressed, since the degree of personalization (or ‘centration’, which comes to the same thing) of a cosmic element being finally the sole parameter by which we can measure its absolute biological value, a world presumed to be heading towards the Impersonal (the word being interpreted in its normal sense of ‘infra-personal’) becomes both unthinkable and unlivable.

An irreversible rise towards the personal: unless it satisfies some Whole comprising these two conjoined attributes, the Universe (psycho-analytically dosed, if I may put it that way) can only become stifling for all reflective activity, that is to say, radically unsuited to any rebound of Evolution. But we are agreed that such a rebound is preparing and indeed has already begun. So we must conclude, unless we favor the idea of a world destined to miscarry through a fault in its construction, that evolutionary irreversibility and personalization (despite their implied anticipation of the future) are realities not of a metaphysical but of a physical order, in the sense that, like the dimensions of Time and Space, they represent general conditions to which the totality of our proceedings must conform.

Failing these conditions, as I have said, everything at the level of Man will cease to move. On the other hand it seems to me that, provided they are fulfilled, nothing can seriously interfere with our natural taste, our impulse, that is to say, towards invention and research. The world will have become habitable for Thought. But is it enough for the world as we are now picturing it to be simply livable, capable, all things considered, of fostering some degree of taste for life? Must it not rather be wholly delectable, if it is to be wholly consistent with itself?

Strange though it may seem, we are here confronted, if we seek to define our Universe in relation to other imaginable kinds of universe, with the necessity and importance of determining what may be called its ‘coefficient of activation’, that is to say, the degree in which it possesses the quality of stimulating the centers of reflective activity contained within it. Theoretically, in virtue of what I have said, a whole series of activations (provided they are positive) is conceivable, each in itself sufficing to create a livable world. But in practice -- does not some sixth sense warn us of this ? -- one value alone is admissible in the experienced reality of action, one alone can truly satisfy us: namely, the greatest of all, in relation to what we are. I do not propose to embark upon any analysis or defense of the very particular kind of optimism which does not for a moment claim that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, but only (a quite different matter!) the most ‘activating’. Let me simply observe that here perhaps we have a basis for prognosticating, in the broadest outline, the religious evolution of the world of tomorrow. From the strictly ‘noodynamic’(‘Noodynamic’: the dynamic of spiritual energy, dynamic of the Spirit. I have ventured to use this neologism because it is clear, expressive and convenient; also because it affirms the necessity for incorporating human psychism, Thought, in a true ‘physics’ of the World.) viewpoint which I have adopted, it may be said that the historic rivalry of mysticisms and creeds, each striving to conquer the earth, represents nothing but a prolonged groping of the human soul m search of a conception of the world in which it will feel itself to be more sensitized, more free and active. This surely means that the faith which finally triumphs must be the one which shows itself to be more capable than any other of inspiring Man to action. And it is here, irrespective of all philosophical or theological considerations, that Christianity decisively takes the lead with its extraordinary power of immortalizing and personalizing in Christ, to the extent of making it lovable, the time-space totality of Evolution.

4. Conclusion. Something New under the Sun

In short, as I said at the beginning, the terrestrial evolution of Life, if it is really to continue as hominization extended to the scale of the Noosphere, cannot rebound in a new spring forward without acquiring a morality, and, to the extent that it needs a ‘faith’, without becoming ‘mysticised’. Which amounts to saying that the complexification of Matter, at the point it has now reached in the human social organism, is physically incapable of advancing further if the Mind does not play a part, not only with its capacity for technical organization, but with its purposive and affective powers of arrangement and inner tension. Which again amounts to saying that from the time of Man (above all, modern Man) the factor consciousness, which for a long time perhaps represented no more than a secondary and accessory effect in Nature, a simple superstructure of the factor complexity, is finally becoming individualized in the form of an autonomous spiritual principle. For its reflective and inventive forward spring it is in some sort necessary that Life, duplicating its evolutionary motive center, should henceforth be sustained by two centers of action, separate and conjoined, one of consciousness and the other of complexity. And herein, if I am right, we may find a bridge of an experimental kind flung across a gap which has hitherto been held to be scientifically unbridgeable. In hominized evolution the Physical and the Psychic, the Without and the Within, Matter and Consciousness, are all found to be functionally linked in one tangible process. Setting aside all metaphysics, the two terms in each of these pairs are articulated in a quasi- measurable fashion one with the other; with the twofold result not only of at last affording us a unified concept of the Universe, but also of breaking down the two barriers behind which Man was coming to believe himself to be for ever imprisoned -- the magic circle of phenomenalism and the infernal circle of egocentrism.

Gone, first of all, the magic circle of phenomenalism, which, we have been assured, must inexorably restrict our gaze to a limited horizon beyond which lies not merely the unknown but the absolutely unknowable. How much has been said even recently(‘It is perhaps inevitable that, having reached the limit beyond which the sure basis of experience fails us, the human spirit, in its impotence, can do no more than revolve in the magic circle of traditional interpretations.’ (Betti, Director of the Chemical Institute of Bologna.) ‘When it comes to those questions on the border-line of the unknowable, all the accumulated knowledge of twenty -- five centuries has done no more than feed the argument, without advancing us a single step towards the solution.’ (Tannery. Pour la Science Hellène; quoted by J. Benda in La Tradition de l’Existentialisme.) about our powerlessness to penetrate in this sense beyond the primitive vision shared by the earliest human minds; that is to say, the impossibility of our advancing a step towards the direct or indirect perception of all that is hidden behind the veil of tangible experience! But it is just this supposedly impenetrable envelope of pure ‘phenomenon’ which the rebounding thrust of human evolution pierces, at least at one point, since by its nature it is irreversible. This does not mean that we can see what lies beyond and behind that trans-phenomenal zone of which we now have an inkling, any more than, having discerned the shape of the earth, we can foresee the landscape lying beyond the horizon. But at least we know that something exists beyond the circle which restricts our view, something into which we shall eventually emerge. It is enough to ensure that we no longer feel imprisoned.

Gone, too, (at least virtually and in aspiration), is the infernal circle of egocentrism, meaning the isolation, in some sort ontological, which prohibits our escape from self to share the point of view even of those we love best: as though the Universe were composed of as many fragmentary universes, repelling each other, as the sum total of the centers of consciousness which it embraces. Who can measure the long chain of harmful, closely interlinked effects which this elemental separatism automatically creates and fosters, by an effect of mass and resonance, within the process of totalization now taking place in Mankind? The iron laws binding economic factors, the irrepressible recurrence of nationalisms, the apparent inevitability of war, the insoluble Hegelian conflicts ‘of master and slave’; what are these supposedly unalterable necessities of the human condition, except, finally, the diverse expression and outcome of exteriority and a mutual antagonism between the individual seeds of thought which we are? . . . Here again let us throw back our heads and breathe freely! For if it be true that the tide of evolutionary totalization sweeping us along requires, for its viability, not only that we must progress towards some form of irreversible unity, but also that this progress must be in the personal sphere, is not this a positive reason for believing that sooner or later something must happen in the world whereby certain basic conditions of the human phenomenon will undergo modification? If our ‘person’ is not to be lost in the vast plurality of Mankind within which it is gradually, and of inescapable physical necessity, becoming integrated; if totalization is to set us free instead of simply mechanizing us; then we must look for and allow for a change of regime. We must assume that under the rapidly mounting pressures forcing them upon one another the human molecules will ultimately succeed in finding their way through the critical barrier of mutual repulsion to enter the inner zone of attraction(This is an old idea which I advanced nearly twenty years ago in an unpublished essay entitled, The Spirit of Earth.)

From that point on we shall be entering a new world of relationships where the hitherto impossible may become simple, being enacted in other dimensions and another environment.

If such a vista still seems to us fantastic, it is simply that we lack imagination. But scientific reason is there to sustain and guide us. Some hundreds of thousands of years ago, upon the first emergence of reflective consciousness, the Universe was surely and beyond question transformed in the very laws of its internal development. Why, then, should we suppose that nothing new will appear under the sun of tomorrow, when the rebounding of Evolution is in full flood?

To sum up.

If social totalization and scientific technology are regarded as they should be, as constituting a direct prolongation, in a human context, of the grand process of the vitalization of Matter, it follows that, from the coming of Man, biological evolution not only rebounds (on a new scale and with new resources) but that it rebounds reflectively upon itself The Darwinian era of survival by Natural Selection (the vital thrust) is thus succeeded by a Lamarckian era of Super-Life brought about by calculated invention (the vital impulse). In Man evolution is interiorized and made purposeful; and at the same time, in the degree in which the strivings of human inventiveness need to be controlled in their operation and sustained in their energies, it imposes upon itself a moral order and ‘mysticizes’ itself. In abstracto or in individuo, technical achievement and moral virtue, science and faith (faith in the future) may seem to be things that are not only separate but even opposed to one another. But in the concrete reality of Total Evolution, and beyond a certain degree of complexity of Consciousness, each of necessity requires the other, because Matter, once hominized, can positively not continue the super-arrangement of itself upon itself except in a specific psychic atmosphere.

Thus a precise functional interlocking of physical and spiritual energy may be discerned. And thus is revealed the necessity for the Universe to present itself to our experience as an irreversible medium of personalization, if the human rebounding of Evolution is not to be stifled at birth.

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 23 September, 1947. Revue des Questions Scientifiques. 20 April i948.

As first proclaimed, in 1789, the Rights of Man were primarily an expression of the individual will to autonomy -- ‘Everything for the Individual within Society’ -- implying that the human race was designed to unfold and culminate in a multiplicity of units achieving, each in itself, their maximum development. This seems to have been the ruling preoccupation and vision of the eighteenth century humanitarians.

Since then, however, owing to the increasing importance of the various forms of collectivity in human society, the nature of the problem has profoundly changed. We can no longer doubt this. For innumerable convergent reasons (the rapid increase of ethnic, economic, political and cultural links) the human individual finds himself definitely involved in an irresistible process tending towards a system of organo-psychic solidarity on earth. Whether we wish it or not, Mankind is becoming collectivized, totalized under the influence of psychic and spiritual forces on a planetary scale. Out of this has arisen, in the heart of every man, the present-day conflict between the individual, ever more conscious of his individual worth, and social affiliations which become ever more demanding.

But the conflict, if we think of it, is only one of appearance. Biologically, as we know, the human unit is not self-sufficing. It is not in isolation (as we might have supposed) but only in appropriate association with his fellows that the individual can hope to attain to the fullness of his personality, his energies, his power of action and his consciousness, more especially since we do not become completely ‘reflective’ (that is to say, ‘men’) except by being reflected in each other. Collectivization and individualization (in the sense of personality, not of social autonomy) are thus not opposed principles. The problem is so to order matters as to ensure that human totalization is brought about, not by the pressure of external forces, but through the internal workings of harmonization and sympathy.

It at once becomes clear, when we adopt this altered standpoint, that the purpose of a new Declaration of the Rights of Man cannot be, as formerly, to ensure the highest possible degree of independence for the individual in society, but to define the conditions under which the inevitable totalization of Mankind may be effected, not only without impairing but so as to enhance, I will not say the autonomy of each of us but (a quite different thing) the incommunicable singularity of being which each of us possesses.

We must no longer seek to organize the world in favor of, and in terms of, the isolated individual; we must try to combine all things for the perfection (‘personalization’) of the individual by his well-ordered integration with the unified group in which Mankind must eventually culminate, both organically and spiritually. That is the problem.

Thus transposed into the framework of an operation with two variables (the progressive, interdependent adjustment of the two processes of collectivization and personalization) the question of the Rights of Man admits of no simple or general answer. But we can at least say that any proposed solution must satisfy the following conditions:

a. The individual in a human society in process of collective organization has not the right to remain inactive, that is to say, not to seek to develop himself to his fullest extent: because upon his individual perfection depends the perfection of all his fellows.

b. Society, embracing the individuals which comprise it, must in its own interest be so constituted that it tends to create the most favorable environment for the full development (physical and spiritual) of what is special to each of them. A commonplace indeed: but one where it is impossible to lay down rules for particular cases, since they vary according to the level of education and the progressive value of the diverse elements to be organized.

c. Whatever measures may be adopted to this end, there is one major principle which must be affirmed and always upheld: in no circumstances, and for no reason, must the forces of collectivity compel the individual to deform or falsify himself (by accepting as true what he sees to be false, for example, which is to lie to himself). Every limitation imposed on the autonomy of the element by the power of the group must, if it is to be justified, operate only in conformity with the free internal structure of the element. Otherwise a fundamental disharmony will arise in the very heart of the collective human organism.

Three principles therefore:

The absolute duty of the individual to develop his own personality.

The relative right of the individual to be placed in circumstances as favorable as possible to his personal development.

The absolute right of the individual, within the social organism, not to be deformed by external coercion but inwardly super-organized by persuasion, that is to say, in conformity with his personal endowments and aspirations.

Three principles to be explicitly affirmed and guaranteed in any new Charter of Humanity.

Paris, 22 March, 1947. UNESCO 1949, pp. 88-9.

1. Definition and Novelty

By ‘faith in Man’ we mean here the more or less active and fervent conviction that Mankind as an organic and organized whole possesses a future: a future consisting not merely of successive years but of higher states to be achieved by struggle. Not merely survival, let us be clear, but some form of higher life or super-life.

Considered in its deepest origins this human trend towards a state of higher being is as old and universal as the world itself. As far back as we can trace it, and even in its humblest manifestations, the advance of Life, however spurred on by the sheer, hard necessity of continuing to exist, has always been inspired by an expectation of something greater. Are not Nature’s countless experiments all variants of a single act of faith, an obstinate feeling of the way towards an outlet leading forward and ever higher? Above all, at that critical point where instinct turned reflexively to thought, and awareness of the future became an accomplished fact on earth, must not Man, m whom this radical change occurred, even in his most primitive state have experienced the vital urge to grasp all things and transcend himself?

Mythology and folklore (we shall come back to this) are filled with symbols and fables expressing the deeply rooted resolve of Earth to find its way to Heaven; from which it follows that we may in a perfectly legitimate sense accept the fact that a generalized, implicit faith of Man in Man is older than all civilization, and that it is this, finally, which constitutes the basic impulse informing all our past history.

But is there not another and even truer sense in which we must affirm that this faith, in the explicit, collective form of our definition, represents a specifically new attitude in the world and therefore calls for our particular attention?

I believe that this is so, on the following grounds.

A major problem posed by the fact, of which we are henceforth assured, that the Universe is in a state of psychic evolution, is the question of how far its evolutionary course is likely to affect our future power of thought. Whatever the eventual answer may be, two things are undeniable: first, that at certain moments in the past, human consciousness -- however unchanging in its essential framework -- has risen to the perception of new dimensions and values; and secondly that the age in which we are living is precisely such a moment of awakening and transformation. In the course of a few generations, almost without our realizing it, our view of the world has been profoundly altered. Under the combined influence of Science and History, and of social developments, the twofold sense of duration and collectivity has pervaded and re-ordered the entire field of our experience; with the twofold result that the future, hitherto a vague succession of monotonous years awaiting an unimportant number of scattered individual lives, is now seen to be a period of positive becoming and maturing -- but one in which we can advance and shape ourselves only in solidarity.

Thus we have the simultaneous growth in our minds of two essentially modern concepts, those of collectivity and of an organic future: a double development precisely engendering the deep-rooted change of heart that was required to bring about the direct transformation of a childlike and instinctive faith in Man into its rational, adult state of constructive, militant faith in Mankind!

A spiritual crisis was inevitable: it has not been slow in coming.

But let us look with open minds at the new world being born around us amid the convulsions of war. Disregarding the superficial chaos which prevents us from seeing clearly, probing beneath the shapeless disorder that so dismays us, let us try to take the pulse and temperature of Earth. If we have any power of vision we are bound to recognize that the ills which so afflict us are above all growing-pains. What looks like no more than a hunger for material well-being is in reality a hunger for higher being: it is the spirit of Mankind suddenly alive with the sense of all that remains to be done if it is to achieve the fulfillment of its powers and possibilities.

2. Power and Ambiguity

It would be criminal or insane to attempt to resist the great explosion of the innate forces of the Earth that is now beginning. Like the collectivization which accompanies it, this upsurge of human faith which we are witnessing is a life-bearing phenomenon, and therefore irresistible. But that does not mean that we should let ourselves be borne passively and indiscriminately on the tide. The more youthful and forceful the energy, the more misguided and dangerous may be its ebullience. We see this all too clearly in the present-day world.

We sincerely believe that in itself, and in its only legitimate and enduring form, faith in Man does not exclude but must on the contrary include the worship of Another -- One who is higher than Man. To grow in stature and strength so as to be able to give more of oneself and clasp in a tighter embrace (as in the Bible story of Jacob and the Angel; and as happens on an everyday level in every passionate union), this is the true and noble manner of interpreting and canalizing the impulse which urges us upwards.

But, as the facts prove only too well, this first way of believing in Man goes hand in hand with another way, more elementary, immediate and simple, and therefore more alluring. Correctly interpreted, I repeat, faith in Man can and indeed must cast us at the feet and into the arms of One who is greater than ourselves. But, it can be argued, why after all should we not conceive this One who is greater than ourselves as being in fact identical with ourselves? Given the power he possesses, why should Man look for a God outside himself? Man, self-sufficient and wholly autonomous, sole master and disposer of his destiny and the world’s -- is not this an even nobler concept?

Here we have the modern version of the heroic temptation of all time, that of the Titans, of Prometheus, of Babel and of Faust; that of Christ on the mountain; a temptation as old as Earth itself; as old as the first reflective awakening of Life to the awareness of its powers. But it is a temptation which is only now entering its critical phase, now that Man has raised himself to the point of being able to measure both the immensity of the Time that lies before him and the almost limitless powers made available to him by his concerted efforts to seize hold of the material springs of the world.

Is the dilemma insoluble or (as we would rather believe) only a temporary one, destined to vanish like so many others when we have reached a higher level of spiritual evolution? We may be in two minds about this.

The fact remains that at the present time a fundamental inner impulse, newly born in our hearts, is tending to find a dual, and divergent, expression in two apparently incompatible spiritual forms; on the one hand, the spirit (let us call it ‘Christian’) of sacrifice and of union centered in the expectation of an Apotheosis in the future; and on the other hand the Promethean or Faustian spirit of self-worship based on the material organization of the earth. The ambiguity is there. And because (always by virtue of a rhythm which may be reversed tomorrow) it is the material and tangible aspect which at this moment of world history seems to hold the initiative in the advance of Life, the struggle is proceeding in a way which suggests that the Promethean faith is the only valid one, or at least the more active. We see no other in the service of the world, or we run the risk of seeing no other. Hence the tendency (which is also as old as the world) of the defenders of the Spirit to regard as diabolical, and to reject as being among the most formidable manifestations of pride, the irrepressible desire for growth and conquest, the unshakeable sense of power and progress, which at present fills the human breast.

But we must not leap to conclusions. Since by definition ambiguity is not perversity but only the danger of perversion, which after all is not the same thing, let us seek to place ourselves psychologically at a level below the point where the dilemma seems to be resolving itself in two irreconcilable forms. In other words, let us try to understand what the faith in Man signifies in its undifferentiated state (pre-Promethean or pre-Christian); what it looks for and what it offers us.

3. The Uniting Force

Present-day Mankind, as it becomes increasingly aware of its unity -- not only past unity in the blood, but future unity in progress -- is experiencing a vital need to close in upon itself. A tendency towards unification is everywhere manifest, and especially in the different branches of religion. We are looking for something that will draw us together, below or above the level of that which divides. It may be said, in the aftermath of the war, that this need is spontaneously and unanimously arising on every hand. But where are we to discover the mysterious principle of rapprochement? Are we to look downwards or upwards -- to our common interest or our common faith?

We must by no means underestimate the force of common interest in a matter of this sort. The visible success of communal undertakings in which the material well-being of the individual becomes essentially dependent on the functioning of the association as a whole; more still, on the world scale, the example of the last war, in which a common danger for a time welded together large sections of the world -- all this decidedly proves that physical necessity, when it happens to coincide, is a synthesizing factor between human particles. But this kind of synthesis, we must note, remains fragile in two respects: firstly, because the coincidence which brought it about is in the nature of things temporary and accidental; secondly, and above all, because elements brought together under the compulsion of necessity or fear cohere only outwardly and on the surface. When the wave of fear or common interest has passed, the union dissolves without having given birth to a soul. Not through external pressure but only from an inward impulse can the unity of Mankind endure and grow.

And this, it seems, is where the major, ‘providential’ role reserved by the future for what we have called ‘faith in Man’ displays itself. A profound common aspiration arising out of the very shape of the modern world -- is not this specifically what is most to be desired, what we most need to offset the growing forces of dissolution and dispersal at work among us?

But here we must be on our guard.

Recently, and in particular through the sympathetic pen of Aldous Huxley, an effort has been made to formulate and crystallize, in a series of abstract propositions, the basis of a common philosophy on which all men of goodwill can agree in order that the world may continue to progress. We believe this to be helpful, and moreover we are persuaded that gradually, in religious thought as in the sciences, a core of universal truth will form and slowly grow, to be accepted by everyone. Can there be any true spiritual evolution without it? But shall we not be misled by this formulation of a common view of the world, infinitely precious in itself, if we consider it simply in terms of its application and result, without looking for the principle and fecundating act of a genuine union? Any abstract scheme tends of its nature to resolve in an arbitrary fashion, and perhaps prematurely for the whole, the ambiguity of the future. There is the risk that it will restrict the movement to a given direction, whereas it is Out of the movement as such that the desired effect of unification must come.

But at the youthful stage in which we are at present considering it, Faith in Man proceeds and operates in a quite different fashion.

It is true that at the outset it presupposes a certain fundamental concept of the place of Man in Nature. But as it rises above this rationalized common platform it becomes charged with a thousand differing potentialities, elastic and even fluid -- indivisible, one might say, by the expressions of hostility to which Thought, in its gropings, may temporarily subject it. Indivisible and even triumphant: for despite all seeming divisions (this is what matters) it continues unassailably to draw together and even to reconcile everything that it pervades. Take the two extremes confronting us at this moment, the Marxist and the Christian, each a convinced believer in his own particular doctrine, but each, we must suppose, fundamentally inspired with an equal faith in Man. Is it not incontestable, a matter of everyday experience, that each of these, to the extent that he believes (and sees the other believe) in the future of the world, feels a basic human sympathy for the other -- not for any sentimental reason, but arising out of the obscure recognition that both are going the same way, and that despite all ideological differences they will eventually, in some manner, come together on the same summit? No doubt each in his own fashion, following his separate path, believes that he has once and for all solved the riddle of the world’s future. But the divergence between them is in reality neither complete nor final, unless we suppose that by some inconceivable and even contradictory feat of exclusion (contradictory because nothing would remain of his faith) the Marxist, for example, were to eliminate from his materialistic doctrine every upward surge towards the spirit. Followed to their conclusion the two paths must certainly end by coming together: for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.

In short we may say that faith in Man, by the combined effect of its universality and its elemental quality, shows itself upon examination to be the general atmosphere in which the higher, more elaborated forms of faith which we all hold in one way or another may best (indeed can only) grow and come together. It is not a formula, it is the environment of union.

No one can doubt that we are all more or less affected by this elementary, primordial faith. Should we otherwise truly belong to our time? And if, through the very force of our spiritual aspirations, we have been inclined to mistrust it, even to feel that we are immune from it, we must look more closely into our own hearts. I have said that the soul has only one summit. It has also only one foundation. Let us look well and we shall find that our Faith in God, detached as it may be, sublimates in us a rising tide of human aspirations. It is to this original sap that we must return if we wish to communicate with the brothers with whom we seek to be united.

Address to the World Congress of Faiths (French section), 8th March, 1947.

(To avoid misunderstanding it may be well to point out that the general synthesis outlined in these pages makes no claim to replace or to exclude the theological account of human destiny. The description of the Noosphere and its attendant biology, as here propounded, is no more opposed to the Divine Transcendence, to Grace, to the Incarnation or to the ultimate Parousia, than is the science of paleontology to the Creation, or of embryology to the First Cause. The reverse is true. To those prepared to follow the author in his thinking it will be apparent that biology merges into theology, and that the Word made Flesh is to be regarded, not as a postulate of science -- which would be in the nature of things absurd -- but as something, a mysterious Alpha and Omega, taking its place within the whole plan of the universe, both human and divine.’ Pierre Charles, S.J.)

Gradually, but by an irresistible process (through the work of Auguste Comte, Gournot, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl and many others) the organic is tending to supersede the legalistic approach in the concepts and formulations of sociologists. A sense of collectivity, arising in our minds Out of the evolutionary sense, has imposed a framework of entirely new dimensions upon all our thinking; so that Mankind has come to present itself to our gaze less and less as a haphazard and extrinsic association of individuals, and increasingly as a biological entity wherein, in some sort, the proceedings and the necessities of the universe m movement are furthered and achieve their culmination. We feel that the relation between Society and Social Organism is no longer a matter of symbolism but must be treated in realistic terms. But the question then arises as to how, in this shifting of values, this passage from the legalistic to the organic, we may correctly apply the analogy. How are we to escape from metaphor without falling into the trap of establishing absurd and oversimplified parallels which would make of the human species no more than a kind of composite, living animal? This is the difficulty which modern sociology encounters.

It is with the idea and in the hope of advancing towards a solution of the problem that I here venture, basing my argument on the widest possible zoological and biological grounds, to put forward a coherent view of the ‘thinking Earth’ in which I believe we may find, undistorted but yet embodying the corrections required by a change of order, the whole process of Life and of vitalization.

To the naturalist Mankind offers a profoundly enigmatic object of study. Anatomically, as Linnaeus perceived, Man differs so little from the other higher primates that, in strict terms of the criteria normally applied in zoological classification, his group represents no more than a very small offshoot, certainly far less than an Order, within the framework of the category as a whole. But in ‘biospherical’ terms, if I may be allowed the word, man’s place on earth is not only predominant but to a certain extent exclusive among living creatures. The small family of hominids, the last shoot to emerge from the main stem of Evolution, has of itself achieved a degree of expansion equal to, or even greater than, that of the greatest vertebrate layers (reptile or mammal) that ever inhabited the earth. Moreover, at the rate it is going, we can already foresee the day when it will have abolished or domesticated all other forms of animal and even plant life.

What does this mean?

I believe that the paradox will disappear and the contradictions be reconciled (with the immediate prospect of a vast field of progress for the new sociology) if we adopt the following premises:

a We must first give their place in the mechanism of biological evolution to the special forces released by the psychic phenomenon of hominization;

b Secondly we must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation, taking place before our eyes and arising out of this factor of hominization, of a particular biological entity such as has never before existed on earth -- the growth, outside and above the biosphere,( This term, invented by Suess, is sometimes interpreted (Vernadsky) in the sense of the ‘terrestrial zone containing life’. I use it here to mean the actual layer of vitalized substance enveloping the earth.) of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noosphere.(from noos, mind: the terrestrial sphere of thinking substance.)

Let us pursue the matter by successively examining (without at any time leaving the plane of scientific thought):

1. Birth and Zoological Structure of the Noosphere

I have referred to the almost contradictory aspect which the section ‘homo’ in the order of primates assumes in the eyes of naturalists: that of a single family suddenly emerging, at the end of the Tertiary Period, to achieve the dimensions of a zoological layer in itself.

If we are to appreciate this strange phenomenon we must look back over the normal development of living forms before the coming of man. It can be characterized in two words: from its first beginnings it never ceased to be ‘phyletic’ and ‘dispersive’. Phyletic in the first place: every species (or group of species) formed a sort of shoot (or phylum) which was obliged to evolve ‘orthogenetically’( The word ‘orthogenesis’ is here used in its widest sense: A prescribed orientation offsetting the effect of chance in the play of heredity.’) along certain prescribed lines (reduction or adaptation of limbs, complication of teeth, increased specialization as carnivores or herbivores, runners, burrowers, swimmers, flyers, etc.); and secondly dispersive, since the different phyla separated at certain points of proliferation, certain ‘knots’ which we may suppose to be periods of particularly active mutation.(Dr. A. Blanc has recently given the name of ‘lysis’ to this phenomenon of the releasing of morphological forces.) Until the coming of man the pattern of the Tree of Life was always that of a fan, a spread of morphological radiations diverging more and more, each radiation culminating in a new ‘knot’ and breaking into a fan of its own.

But at the human level a radical change, seemingly due to the spiritual phenomenon of Reflection, overtook this law of development. It is generally accepted that what distinguishes man psychologically from other living creatures is the power acquired by his consciousness of turning in upon itself. The animal knows, it has been said; but only man, among animals, knows that he knows. This faculty has given birth to a host of new attributes in men -- freedom of choice, foresight, the ability to plan and to construct, and many others. So much is clear to everyone. But what has perhaps not been sufficiently noted is that, still by virtue of this power of Reflection, living hominized elements become capable (indeed are under an irresistible compulsion) of drawing close to one another, of communicating, finally of uniting. The centers of consciousness, acquiring autonomy as they emerge into the sphere of reflection, tend to escape from their own phylum, which granulates into a line of individuals. Instead they pass tangentially into a field of force which attracts one to another, fiber to fiber, phylum to phylum: with the result that the entire system of zoological radiations which in the ordinary course would have culminated in a knot and a fanning out of new divergent lines, now tends to fold in upon itself. In time, with the Reflexion of the individual upon himself, there comes an Inflexion, then a clustering together of the living shoots, soon to be followed (because of the biological advantage which the group gains by its greater cohesion) by the spread of the living complex thus constituted over the whole surface of the globe. The critical point of Reflexion in the biological unit becomes the critical point of Inflexion for the phyla, which in turn becomes the point of ‘circumflexion’ (if I may use the word) for the whole sheaf of inward-folding phyla. Or, if you prefer, the reflective coiling of the individual upon himself leads to the coiling of the phyla upon each other, which in turn leads to the coiling of the whole system about the closed convexity of the celestial body which carries us. Or we may talk in yet other terms of psychic centration, phyletic intertwining and planetary envelopment: three genetically associated occurrences which, taken together, give birth to the Noosphere.

Viewed in this aspect, entirely borne out by experience, the collective human organism which the economists so hazily envisage emerges decisively from the mists of speculation to take its place and assume the brilliance of a clearly defined star of the first magnitude in the zoological sky. Until this point was reached Nature, in her generalized effort of ‘complexification’, to which I shall return later, had failed for lack of suitable material to achieve any grouping of individuals outside the family structure (the termitary, the ant-hill, the hive). ‘With man, thanks to the extraordinary agglutinative property of thought, she has at last been able to achieve, throughout an entire living group, a total synthesis of which the process is still clearly apparent, if we trouble to look, in the ‘scaled’ structure of the modern human world. Anthropologists, sociologists and historians have long noted, without being very well able to account for it, the enveloping and concretionary nature of the innumerable ethnic and cultural layers whose growth, expansion and rhythmic overlapping endow humanity with its present aspect of extreme variety in unity. This ‘bulbary’ appearance becomes instantly and luminously clear if we regard the human group, in zoological terms, as simply a normal sheaf of phyla in which, owing to the emergence of a powerful field of attraction, the fundamental divergent tendency of the evolutionary radiations is overcome by a stronger force inducing them to converge. In present-day mankind, within (as I call it) the Noosphere, we are for the first time able to contemplate, at the very top of the evolutionary tree, the result that can be produced by a synthesis not merely of individuals but of entire zoological shoots.

Thus we find ourselves in the presence, in actual possession, of the super-organism we have been seeking, of whose existence we were intuitively aware. The human conglomerate which the sociologists needed for the furtherance of their speculations and formulations now appears scientifically defined, manifesting itself in its proper time and place, like an object entirely new and yet awaited in the sky of life. It remains for us to observe the world by the light it sheds, which throws into astonishing relief the great ensemble of everyday phenomena with which we have always lived, without perceiving their reality, their immediacy or their vastness.

2. Anatomy of the Noosphere

It may be said, speaking in very general terms, that in asserting the zoological nature of the Noosphere we confirm the sociologists’ view of human institutions as organic. Once the exceptional, but fundamentally biological, nature of the collective human complex is accepted, nothing prevents us (provided we take into account the modifications which have occurred in the dimensions in which we are working) from treating as authentic organs the diverse social organisms which have gradually evolved in the course of the history of the human race. Directly Mankind, from the nature of its origin, presents itself to our experience as a true super-body, the internal connections of this body, by reason of homogeneity, can only be treated and understood as super-organs and super-members. Thus, for example (due allowance being made for the change of scale and environment), it becomes legitimate to talk in the sphere of economics of the existence and development of a circulatory or a nutritional system applicable to Mankind as a whole.

That we must proceed slowly and critically in this attempt to construct an ‘anatomy’ of society is evident. Used without discernment and a profound knowledge of biology, the procedure is in danger of lapsing into puerile and sterile subtleties. But progressively pursued, and proceeding from certain major fields of knowledge, the method shows itself to be both fruitful and illuminating. This is what I shall seek to demonstrate in the three spheres of culture, machinery and research, by successively ‘dissecting’ first the hereditary, then the mechanical and finally the cerebral apparatus of the Noosphere.

a The apparatus of heredity. One of the paradoxes attaching to the human species, a cause of some bitterness among biologists, is that every man comes into the world as defenseless, and as incapable of finding his way single-handed in our civilization, as the new-born Sinanthropus a hundred thousand years ago. As Jean Rostand has remarked, the many centuries during which man has labored to improve himself have brought about no organic change in him, they have not affected his chromosomes. So much so, the author goes on to imply, that all the advances on which we so pride ourselves remain biologically precarious, superficial or even exterior to ourselves. There is much that might be said about this; but let us pass over the question of whether we have not undergone some modification, even m our chromosomes, since the era of the pre-Hominids or even that of Cro-magnon man. Let us concede provisionally that we have developed no hereditary trait in that period rendering us more innately capable of perception and movement in the new dimensions of society, space and time. How does this affect our appreciation and evaluation of human progress? I shall show that the answer is splendid and highly encouraging -- provided we do not lose sight of the organic reality of the Noosphere.

‘Separate the new-born child from human society,’ you may say, ‘and you will see how weak he is!’ But surely it is clear that this act of isolation is precisely what must not be done, and indeed cannot be done. From the moment when, as I have said, the phyletic strands began to reach towards one another, weaving the first outlines of the Noosphere, a new matrix, co-extensive with the whole human group, was formed about the newly-born human child -- a matrix out of which he cannot be wrenched without incurring mutilation in the most physical core of his biological being. Traditions of every kind, hoarded and manifested in gesture and language, in schools, libraries, museums, bodies of law and religion, philosophy and science -- everything that accumulates, arranges itself, recurs and adds to itself, becoming the collective memory of the human race -- all this we may see as no more than an outer garment, an epiphenomenon precariously superimposed upon all the other edifices of Nature (the only truly organic ones, as it may appear): but it is precisely this optical illusion which we have to overcome if our realism is to reach to the heart of the matter. It is undoubtedly true that before Man hereditary characteristics were transmitted principally through the reproductive cells. But after the coming of Man another kind of heredity shows itself and becomes predominant; one which was indeed foreshadowed and essayed long before Man, among the highest forms of insects and vertebrates.(A small cynocephalus [baboon], born in captivity, will commit all kinds of blunders when set free [heredity of education]. But in similar conditions a young otter, being put in the water, will at once know how to behave [chromosomic heredity]. Cf. Eugène N. Marais, The soul of the white Ant..) This is the heredity of example and education. In Man, as though by a stroke of genius on the part of Life, and in accord with the grand phenomenon of phyletic coiling, heredity, hitherto primarily chromosomic (that is to say, carried by the genes) becomes primarily ‘Noospheric’-- transmitted, that is to say, by the surrounding environment. In this new form, and having lost nothing of its physical reality (indeed, as much superior to its first state as the Noosphere is superior to the simple, isolated phylum) it acquires, by becoming exterior to the individual, an incomparable substance and capacity. For let me put this question: what system of chromosomes would be as capable as our immense educational system of indefinitely storing and infallibily preserving the huge array of truths and systematized technical knowledge which, steadily accumulating, represents the patrimony of mankind?

Exteriorization, enrichment: we must not lose sight of these two words. We shall come upon them again, quite unchanged, when we turn to consider the machine.

b The mechanical apparatus. The fact was noted long ago (Edouard Le Roy, Les Origines humaines et le Probleme de I’Intelligence.) what has enabled man zoologically to emerge and triumph upon earth, is that he has avoided the anatomical mechanization of his body. In all other animals we find a tendency, irresistible and clearly apparent, for the living creature to convert its own limbs into tools, its teeth and even its face. We see paws turned into pincers, paws equipped with hooves for running, burrowing paws and muzzles, winged paws, beaks, tusks and so on -- innumerable adaptations giving birth to as many phyla, and each ending in a blind-alley of specialization. On this dangerous slope leading to organic imprisonment Man alone has pulled up in time. Having arrived at the tetrapod stage he contrived to stay there without further reducing the versatility of his limbs. Possessing hands as well as intelligence, and being able, in consequence, to devise artificial instruments without becoming somatically involved, he has succeeded, while increasing and boundlessly extending his mechanical efficiency, in preserving intact his freedom of choice and power of reason.

The significance and biological function of the tool separated from the limb has, as I say, long been recognized; and it has long been realized that the tool separated from Man develops a kind of autonomous vitality.( e.g., Jacques Lafitte, Réflexions sur la Science de La Machine. La Nouvelle Journée, no 21, 1932.) We have passive machines giving birth to the active machine, which in turn is followed by the automatic machine. Those are the main classifications; but within each classification what an immense proliferation there is of branches and offshoots, each endowed with a sort of evolutionary potential, irresistible both logically and biologically! We have only to think of the motor-car or the aeroplane.

All this has been noted and often said. But what has not yet been sufficiently taken into account, although it explains everything, is the extent to which this process of mechanization is a collective affair, and the way in which it finally creates, on the periphery of the human race, an organism that is collective in its nature and amplitude.

Let us consider this.

With and since the coming of Man a new law of Nature has come into force -- that of convergence. The convergence of the phyla both ensues from, and of itself leads to, the coming together of individuals within the peculiarly ‘attaching’ atmosphere created by the phenomenon of Reflexion. And out of this convergence, as I have said, there arises a very real social inheritance, produced by the synthetic recording of human experience. But if we look for it we may observe precisely the same phenomenon in the case of the machine. Every new tool conceived in the course of history, although it may have been invented in the first place by an individual, has rapidly become the instrument of all men; and not merely by being passed from hand to hand, spreading from one man to his neighbor, but by being adopted corporatively by all men together. What started as an individual creation has been immediately and automatically transformed into a global, quasi-autonomous possession of the entire mass of men. We see this from prehistoric times, and we see it with a vivid clarity in the present era of industrial explosion. Consider the locomotive, the dynamo, the aeroplane, the cinema, the radio -- anything. Can there be any doubt that these innumerable appliances are born and grow, successively and in unison, from roots established in an existing mechanical world-state? For a long time past there have been neither isolated inventors nor machines. To an increasing extent every machine comes into being as a function of every other machine; and, again to an increasing extent, all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form a single, vast, organized mechanism. Necessarily following the inflexive tendency of the zoological phyla, the mechanical phyla in their turn curve inward in the case of man, thus accelerating and multiplying their own growth and forming a single gigantic network girdling the earth. And the basis, the inventive core of this vast apparatus, what is it if not the thinking center of the Noosphere?

When Homo faber came into being the first rudimentary tool was born as an appendage of the human body. Today the tool has been transformed into a mechanized envelope (coherent within itself and immensely varied) appertaining to all mankind. From being somatic it has become ‘noospheric’. And just as the individual at the outset was enabled by the tool to preserve and develop his first, elemental psychic potentialities, so today the Noosphere, disgorging the machine from its innermost organic recesses, is capable of, and in process of, developing a brain of its own.

c The cerebral apparatus. Between the human brain, with its milliards of inter -- connected nerve -- cells, and the apparatus of social thought, with its hundreds of millions of individuals thinking collectively, there is an evident kinship which biologists of the stature of Julian Huxley have not hesitated to examine and expand on critical lines.(Lecture delivered in New York and published in the Scientific Monthly, 1940.) On the one hand we have a single brain, formed of nervous nuclei, and on the other a Brain of brains. It is true that between these two organic complexes a major difference exists. Whereas in the case of the individual brain thought emerges from a system of non-thinking nervous fibers, in the case of the collective brain each separate unit is in itself an autonomous center of reflection. If the comparison is to be a just one we must, at every point of resemblance, take this difference into account, But when all allowance is made the fact remains that the analogies between the two systems arc so numerous, and so compelling, that reason forbids us to regard the parallel as either purely superficial or a mere matter of chance. Let us take a rapid glance at the structure and functioning of what might be termed the ‘cerebroid’ organ of the Noosphere.

First the structure: and here I must turn back to the machine. I have said that, thanks to the machine, Man has contrived both severally and collectively to prevent the best of himself from being absorbed in purely physiological and functional uses, as has happened to other animals. But in addition to its protective role, how can we fail to see the machine as playing a constructive part in the creation of a truly collective consciousness? It is not merely a matter of the machine which liberates, relieving both individual and collective thought of the trammels which hinder its progress, but also of the machine which creates, helping to assemble, and to concentrate in the form of an ever more deeply penetrating organism, all the reflective elements upon earth.

I am thinking, of course, in the first place of the extraordinary network of radio and television communications which, perhaps anticipating the direct inter-communication of brains through the mysterious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of ‘etherized’ universal consciousness.

But I am also thinking of the insidious growth of those astonishing electronic computers which, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second, not only relieve our brains of tedious and exhausting work but, because they enhance the essential (and too little noted) factor of ‘speed of thought’, are also paving the way for a revolution in the sphere of research. And there are other forms of technical equipment, such as the electronic microscope whereby our sensory vision, the principal source of our ideas, has been enabled to leap the optical gap between the cell and the direct observation of large molecules.

There is a school of philosophy which smiles disdainfully at these and kindred forms of progress. ‘Commercial machines’, we hear them say, ‘machines for people in a hurry, designed to gain time and money.’ One is tempted to call them blind, since they fail to perceive that all these material instruments, ineluctably linked in their birth and development, are finally nothing less than the manifestation of a particular kind of super-Brain, capable of attaining mastery over some super-sphere in the universe and in the realm of thought. ‘Everything for the individual !’ -- such was the reaffirmation of my brilliant friend, Gaylord Simpson,( George Gaylord Simpson, The Role of Individual in Evolution, Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 31, no. I, 1941.) in a recent outburst of anti-totalitarian fervor. But let us grasp this point clearly. No doubt it is true, scientifically speaking, that no distinct center of superhuman consciousness has yet appeared on earth (at least in the living world) for which it may be claimed or predicted that one day it will exercise a centralizing function, in relation to associated human thought, similar to the role of the individual ‘I’ in relation to the cells of the brain. But that is far from saying that, influenced by the links which unite them, our grouped minds working together are not capable of achieving results which no one member of the group could achieve alone, and from which every individual within the collective process benefits ‘integrally’, although still not in the total sense.

We have only to consider any of the new concepts and intuitions which, particularly during the past century, have become or are in process of becoming the indestructible keystones and fabric of our thought -- the idea of the atom, for example, or of organic Time or Evolution. It is surely obvious that no man on earth could alone have evolved them; no one man, thinking by himself can encompass, master or exhaust them; yet every man on earth shares, in himself in the universal heightening of consciousness promoted by the existence in our minds of these new concepts of matter and new dimensions of cosmic reality. It is not a question of simple accretion but of synthesis. Not, it is true (at least not yet, here below) synthesis pushed to the point where it calls into being some new kind of autonomous super-center in the depths of the synthesized, but a synthesis which at least suffices to erect, as though it were a vault above our heads, a domain of interwoven consciousness, the site, support and instrument of super-vision and super-ideas. No doubt everything proceeds from the individual and in the first instance depends on the individual; but it is on a higher level than the individual that everything achieves its fulfillment.

We have touched upon the apparatus of heredity, machinery and mind. It would be rash and often absurd to attempt to pursue further, and in detail, the comparison between the organism of the individual and that of the Noosphere. But the fact that the general line of analogy is valid and fruitful seems to me to be definitely proved by the very remarkable fact that these three systems, taken in conjunction, not only form a complementary and coherent whole, consistent within itself, but, which is even more easy of demonstration, that this whole is capable of breaking into motion and of working -- that it functions, in a word.

3. The Physiology of the Noosphere

One of the most impressive effects of the power of collective vision which is conferred upon us by the formation of a common brain is the perception of ‘great slow movements’, so vast and slow that they are only observable over immense stretches of time. The currents that give birth to sidereal systems; the folds and upthrusts that form mountains and continents; the ebb and flow within the biosphere -- in each case what we had supposed to be the extreme of immobility and stability is discovered to be a state of fundamental and irresistible movement.

So it is with the Noosphere.

I have already attempted a sort of anatomy of the major organs of the Noosphere. It remains for me to show that these separate parts, planetary in their dimensions, are not designed to remain in a state of rest. The formidable wheels turn, and in their combined action hidden forces are engendered which circulate throughout the gigantic system. What goes on around us in the human mass is not merely a flurry of disordered movement, as in a gas; something is purposefully stirring, as in a living being.

Let us try to gain some understanding of this vast internal process of which we are all a part and to which we all contribute, almost without knowing it.

At the heart of the entire movement, like the mainspring of a clock, there reappears, in identifiable form, what we have termed the inflexion of human stems upon themselves. It was of this mysteriously compelled in-folding, as I have said, that the human race was born. I will now add that it is through the continued operation of the same movement that the race persists and functions. Indeed, we have only to open our eyes to be as it were spellbound by the dazzling vision, the spectacle of human shoots caught in the combined play of irresistible forces which slowly but surely continue to close and coil about us. Despite the havoc of war, the population on the limited surface of this planet which bears us is increasing in almost geometrical progression; while at the same time the scope of each human molecule, in terms of movement, information and influence, is becoming rapidly co-extensive with the whole surface of the globe. A state of tightening compression, in short; but even more, thanks to the biological intermingling developed to its uttermost extent by the growth of Reflection, a state of organized inter-penetration, in which each element is linked with every other. No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.

What is the significance of this multiform embrace, both external and internal, against which we struggle in vain? Can it mean that, caught in the ramifications of a sightless mechanism, we are destined to perish by stifling each other? No; for as the coil grows tighter and the tension rises the forces of compression in the vast generator find an effective outlet.

We begin to catch sight of it in the study of an all too familiar phenomenon, disquieting in appearance, but in fact highly revealing and reassuring -- the phenomenon of unemployment. Owing to the extraordinarily rapid development of the machine a rapidly increasing number of workers, running into tens of millions, are out of work. The experts gaze in dismay at this economic apparatus, their own creation, which instead of absorbing all the units of human energy with which they furnish it rejects an increasing number, as though the machine they devised were working to defeat their purpose. Economists are horrified by the growing number of idle hands. Why do they not look a little more to biology for guidance and enlightenment? In its progress through a million centuries, mounting from the depths of the unconscious to consciousness, when has Life proceeded otherwise than by releasing psychic forces through the medium of the mechanisms it has devised? We have only to consider the evolution of the nervous system in the animal series, proceeding by chronological stages over a great period of time. Or let the theorists consider themselves. How are they capable of reasoning at all if not because within them their visceral system has been taught to function automatically, while around them society is so well organized that they have both the strength and the leisure to calculate and reflect? What is true for each individual man is precisely what is happening at this moment on the higher level of mankind. Like a heavenly body that heats as it contracts, such, and in a twofold respect, is the Noosphere: first in intensity, the degree in which its tension and psychic temperature are heightened by the coming together and mutual stimulation of thinking centers throughout its extent; and also quantitatively through the growing number of people able to use their brains because they are freed from the need to labor with their hands. So that to attempt to suppress unemployment by incorporating the unemployed in the machine would be against the purpose of Nature and a biological absurdity. The Noosphere can function only by releasing more and more spiritual energy with an ever higher potential.

To all this you may remark as follows: ‘Very well; Jet us agree that the combined effect of phyletic intertwining and mechanical progress causes life to boil over. But in that case, and surely it is the root of the matter, how are we to canalize and use the rising tide of liberated consciousness, that is still so crude and unformed?’ My answer is: ‘By transforming it.’ And at this point, having invited you to reflect upon the phenomenon of unemployment, I will draw your attention to another and no less universal phenomenon, equally characteristic of the present age -- the phenomenon of research.

Understanding, discovery, invention . . . From the first awakening of his reflective consciousness, Man has been possessed by the demon of discovery; but until a very recent epoch this profound need remained latent, diffused and unorganized in the human mass. In every past generation true seekers, those by vocation or profession, are to be found; but in the past they were no more than a handful of individuals, generally isolated, and of a type that was virtually abnormal -- the ‘inquisitive’. Today, without our having noticed it, the situation is entirely changed. In fields embracing every aspect of physical matter, life and thought, the research-workers are to be numbered in hundreds of thousands, and they no longer work in isolation but in teams endowed with penetrative powers that it seems nothing can withstand. In this respect too, the movement is becoming generalized and is accelerating to the point where we must be blind not to see in it an essential trend in human affairs. Research, which until yesterday was a luxury pursuit, is in process of becoming a major, indeed the principal, function of humanity. As to the significance of this great event, I for my part can see only one way to account for it. It is that the enormous surplus of free energy released by the in-folding of the Noosphere is destined by a natural evolutionary process to flow into the construction and functioning of what I have called its ‘Brain’. As in the case of all the organisms preceding it, but on an immense scale, humanity is in process of ‘cerebralizing’ itself. And our proper biological course, in making use of what we call our leisure, is to devote it to a new kind of work on a higher plane: that is to say, to a general and concerted effort of vision. The Noosphere, in short, is a stupendous thinking machine.

It is in this sense alone, as I believe, that the horizon appears and we can gain a clear view of the human world surrounding us. In harmony with the cosmic impulse which leads to the constant disintegration of atoms and the attendant release of energy, Life (though probably localized on a few rare planets) compels us increasingly to view it as an underlying current in the flow of which matter tends to order itself upon itself with the emergence of consciousness. On the one hand we have physical radiation bound up with disintegration; and on the other hand psychic radiation bound up with an ordered aggregation of the stuff of the universe. In the eyes of nineteenth century science the interiorization of the world, leading to the phenomenon of Reflection, might still pass for an accident and an anomaly. We now see it to be a clearly defined process co-extensive with the whole of reality. Complexification due to the growth of consciousness, or consciousness the outcome of complexity: experimentally the two terms are inseparable. Like related quantities they vary simultaneously. And surely it is within this generalized cosmic process that the Noosphere, a particular and extreme case, has its natural place and takes its shape. The maximum of complication, represented by phyletic in-folding, and in con -- sequence the maximum of consciousness emerging from the system of individual brains, co-ordinated and mutually supporting. And this is exactly what was to be expected.

But it is assuredly a remarkable coincidence that in justifying the organic interpretation of the Phenomenon of Man, as we have sought to do, we should also be paving the way for a reasonable forecast as to our future destiny, and the fate which is reserved for us at the end of Time.

4. The Phases and Future of the Noosphere

We have found it possible to express the social totalization which we are undergoing in terms of a clearly identifiable biological process: proceeding from this we may surely look into the future and predict the course of the trajectory we are describing. Once we have accepted that the formation of a collective human organism, a Noosphere, conforms to the general law of recurrence which leads to the heightening of Consciousness in the universe as a function of complexity, a vast prospect opens before us. To what regions and through what phases may we suppose that the extension of the rising curve of hominization will carry us?

Immediately confronting us (indeed, already in progress) we have what may be called a ‘phase of planetization’.

It can truly be said, no doubt, that the human group succeeded long ago in covering the face of the earth, and that over a long period its state of zoological ubiquity has tended to be transformed into an organized aggregate; but it must be clear that the transformation is only now reaching its point of full maturity. Let us glance over the main stages of this long history of aggregation. First, in the depths of the past, we find a thin scattering of hunting groups spread here and there throughout the Ancient World. At a later stage, some fifteen thousand years ago, we see a second scattering, very much more dense and clearly defined: that of agricultural groups installed in fertile valleys -- centers of social life where man, arrived at a state of stability, achieved the expansive powers which were to enable him to invade the New World. Then, only seven or eight thousand years ago, there came the first civilizations, each covering a large part of a continent. These were succeeded by the real empires. And so on . . . patches of humanity growing steadily larger, overlapping, often absorbing one another, thereafter to break apart and again reform in still larger patches. As we view this process, the spreading, thickening and irresistible coalescence, can we fail to perceive its eventual outcome? The last blank spaces have vanished from the map of mankind. There is contact everywhere, and how close it has become! Today, embedded in the economic and psychic network which I have described, two great human blocks alone remain confronting one another. Is it not inevitable that in one way or another these two will eventually coalesce? Preceded by a tremor, a wave of ‘shared impulse’ extending to the very depths of the social and ethnic masses in their need and claim to participate, without distinction of class or color, in the onward march of human affairs, the final act is already visibly preparing. Although the form is not yet discernible, mankind tomorrow will awaken to a ‘pan-organized’ world.

But, and we must make no mistake about this, there will be an essential difference, a difference of order, between the unitary state towards which we are moving and everything we have hitherto known. The greatest empires in history have never covered more than fragments of the earth. What will be the specifically new manifestations which we have to look for in the transition to totality? Until now we have never seen mind manifest itself on this planet except in separated groups and in the static state. What sort of current will be generated, what unknown territory will be opened up, when the circuit is suddenly completed?

I believe that what is now being shaped in the bosom of planetized humanity is essentially a rebounding of evolution upon itself. We all know about the projectiles whose impetus is renewed by the firing of a series of staged rockets. Some such procedure, it seems to me, is what Life is preparing at this moment, to accomplish the supreme, ultimate stage. The first stage was the elaboration of lower organisms, up to and including Man, by the use and irrational combination of elementary sources of energy received or released by the planet. The second stage is the super-evolution of Man, individually and collectively, by the use of refined forms of energy scientifically harnessed and applied in the bosom of the Noosphere, thanks to the co-ordinated efforts of all men working reflectively and unanimously upon themselves. Who can say whither, coiled back upon our own organism, our combined knowledge of the atom, of hormones, of the cell and the laws of heredity will take us? Who can say what forces may be released, what radiations, what new arrangements never hitherto attempted by Nature, what formidable powers we may henceforth be able to use, for the first time in the history of the world? This is Life setting out upon a second adventure from the springboard it established when it created humankind.

But all this is no more than the outward face of the phenomenon. In becoming planetized humanity is acquiring new physical powers which will enable it to super-organize matter. And, even more important, is it not possible that by the direct converging of its members it will be able, as though by resonance, to release psychic powers whose existence is still unsuspected? I have already spoken of the recent emergence of certain new faculties in our minds, the sense of genetic duration and the sense of collectivity. Inevitably, as a natural consequence, this awakening must enhance in us, from all sides, a generalized sense of the organic, through which the entire complex of inter-human and inter-cosmic relations will become charged with an immediacy, an intimacy and a realism such as has long been dreamed of and apprehended by certain spirits particularly endowed with the ‘sense of the universal’, but which has never yet been collectively applied. And it is in the depths and by grace of this new inward sphere, the attribute of planetized Life, that an event seems possible which has hitherto been incapable of realization: I mean the pervasion of the human mass by the power of sympathy. It may in part be passive sympathy, a communication of mind and spirit that will make the phenomenon of telepathy, still sporadic and haphazard, both general and normal. But above all it will be a state of active sympathy in which each separate human element, breaking out of its insulated state under the impulse of the tensions generated in the Noosphere, will emerge into a field of prodigious affinities, which we may already conjecture in theory. For if the power of attraction between simple atoms is so great, what may we not expect if similar bonds are contracted between human molecules?

Humanity, as I have said, is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its powers of unification can never be fully achieved? To put it in other words, must not the constructive developments now taking place within the Noosphere in the realm of sight and reason necessarily also penetrate to the sphere of feeling? The idea may seem fantastic when one looks at our present world, still dominated by the forces of hatred and repulsion. But is not this simply because we refuse to heed the admonitions of science, which is daily proving to us, in every field, that seemingly impossible changes become easy and even inevitable directly there is a change in the order of the dimensions?

To me two things, at least, seem certain. The first is that, following the state of collective organization we have already achieved, the process of planetization can only advance ever further in the direction of growing unanimity. And the second is that this growth of unanimity, being of its nature convergent, cannot continue indefinitely without reaching the natural limit of its course. Every cone has an apex. In the case of this human aggregation how shall we seek, not to imagine but to define the supreme point of coalescence? In terms of the strictly phenomenal viewpoint which I have adopted throughout this paper, it seems to me that the following may be said:

What at the very beginning made the first man, was, as we know, the heightening of the individual consciousness to the point where it acquired the power of Reflection. And the measure of human progress during the centuries which followed is, as I have sought to show, the increase of this reflective power through the interaction, or conjugated thought, of conscious minds working upon one another. Well, what will finally crown and limit collective humanity at the ultimate stage of its evolution, is and must be, by reason of continuity and homogeneity, the establishment of a sort of focal point at the heart of the reflective apparatus as a whole.

If we concede this the whole of human history appears as a progress between two critical points: from the lowest point of elementary consciousness to the ultimate, noospherical point of Reflection. In biological terms, humanity will have completed itself and fully achieved its internal equilibrium only when it is psychically centered upon itself (which may yet take several million years).

In a final effort of thought let us remove ourselves to that ultimate summit where in the remote future, but seen from the present, the tide which bears us reaches its culmination. Is there anything further to be discerned beyond that last peak etched against the horizon ? -- Yes and no.

In the first place no, because at that mysterious pole crowning our ascent the compass that has guided us runs amok. It was by the law of ‘consciousness and complexity’ that we set our course: a consciousness becoming ever more centrated, emerging from the heart of an increasingly vast system of more numerous and better organized elements. But now we are faced by an entirely new situation: for the first time we have no multiple material under our hands. Unless, as seems infinitely improbable, we are destined by contact with other thinking planets, across the abysses of space and time, some day to become integrated within an organized complex composed of a number of Noospheres, humanity, having reached maturity, will remain alone, face to face with itself. And at the same time our law of recurrence, based on the play of interrelated syntheses, will have ceased to operate.

So in one sense it all seems to be over; as though, having reached its final point of Noospheric Reflexion, the cosmic impulse towards consciousness has become exhausted, condemned to sink back into the state of disintegration implacably imposed on it by the laws of stellar physics. But in another sense nothing will be ended: for at this point, and at the height of its powers, something else conies into operation, a primary attribute of Reflection concerning which we have hitherto said nothing -- the will to survive. In reflecting upon itself the individual consciousness acquires the formidable property of foreseeing the future, that is to say, death. And at the same time it knows that it is psychologically impossible for it to continue to work in pursuance of the purposes of Life unless something, the best of the work, is preserved from total destruction. In this resides the whole problem of action. We have not yet taken sufficient account of the fact that this demand for the Absolute, not always easily discernible in the isolated human unit, is one of the impulses which grow and are intensified in the Noosphere. Applied to the individual the idea of total extinction may not at first sight appall us; but extended to humanity as a whole it revolts and sickens us. The fact is that the more Humanity becomes aware of its duration, its number and its potentialities -- and also of the enormous burden it must bear in order to survive -- the more does it realize that if all this labor is to end in nothing, then we have been cheated and can only rebel. In a planetized Humanity the insistence upon irreversibility becomes a specific requisite of action; and it can only grow and continue to grow as Life reveals itself as being ever more rich, an ever heavier load. So that, paradoxically, it is at that ultimate point of centration which renders it cosmically unique, that is to say apparently incapable of any further synthesis, that the Noosphere will have become charged to the fullest extent with psychic energies to impel it forward in yet another advance. . . .

And what can this mean except that, like those planetary orbits which seem to traverse our solar system without remaining within it, the curve of consciousness, pursuing its course of growing complexity, will break through the material framework of Time and Space to escape somewhere towards an ultra-center of unification and wholeness, where there will finally be assembled, and in detail, everything that is irreplaceable and incommunicable in the world.

And it is here, an inevitable intrusion in terms of biology, and in its proper place in terms of science, that we come to the problem of God.

Conclusion: The Higher Freedom

Let us turn to cast an eye over the road that we have followed. At the beginning we seemed to see around us nothing but a disconnected and disordered humanity: the crowd, the mass, in which, it may be, we saw only brutality and ugliness. I have tried, fortified by the most generally accepted and solid conclusions of science, to take the reader above this scene of turmoil; and as we have risen higher so has the prospect acquired a more ordered shape. Like the petals of a gigantic lotus at the end of the day, we have seen human petals of planetary dimensions slowly closing in upon themselves. And at the heart of this huge calyx, beneath the pressure of its in-folding, a center of power has been revealed where spiritual energy, gradually released by a vast totalitarian mechanism, then concentrated by heredity within a sort of super-brain, has little by little been transformed into a common vision growing ever more intense. In this spectacle of tranquillity and intensity, where the anomalies of detail, so disconcerting on our individual scale, vanish to give place to a vast, serene and irresistible movement from the heart, everything is contained and everything harmonized in accord with the rest of the universe. Life and consciousness are no longer chance anomalies in Nature; rather we find in biology a complement to the physics of matter. On the one hand, I repeat, the stuff of the world dispersing through the radiation of its elemental energy; and on the other hand the same stuff re-converging through the radiation of thought. The fantastic at either end: but surely the one is necessary to balance the other? Thus harmony is achieved in the ultimate perspective, and, furthermore, a program for the future: for if this view is accepted we see a splendid goal before us, and a clear line of progress. Coherence and fecundity, the two criteria of truth.

Is this all illusion, or is it reality?

It is for the reader to decide. But to those who hesitate, or who refuse to commit themselves, I would say: ‘Have you anything else, anything better to suggest that will account scientifically for the phenomenon of man considered as a whole, in the light of his past development and present progress?’

You may reply to me that this is all very well, but is there not something lacking, an essential element, in this system which I claim to be so coherent? Within that grandiose machine-in-motion which I visualize, what becomes of that pearl beyond price, our personal being? What remains of our freedom of choice and action?

But do you not see that from the standpoint I have adopted it appears everywhere -- and is everywhere heightened?

I know very well that by a kind of innate obsession we cannot rid ourselves of the idea that we become most masters of ourselves by being as isolated as possible. But is not this the reverse of the truth? We must not forget that in each of us, by our very nature, everything is in an elemental state, including our freedom of action. We can only achieve a wider degree of freedom by joining and associating with others in an appropriate way. This is, to be sure, a dangerous operation, since, whether it be a case of disorderly intermingling, or of some simple form of co-ordination, like the meshing of gear-wheels, our activities tend to cancel one another out or to become mechanical -- we find this only too often in practice. Yet it is also salutary, since the approach of spirit to spirit in a common vision or a shared passion undoubtedly enriches all; in the case of a team, for example, or of two lovers. Achieved with sympathy, union does not restrict but exalts the possibilities of our being. We see this everywhere and every day on a limited scale. Why should it not be worth correspondingly more on a vast and all-embracing scale, if the law applies to the very structure of things? It is simply a question of tension within the field that polarizes and attracts. In the case of a blind aggregation, some form of unification brought about by purely mechanical means, the principle of large numbers comes into play. That is true: but where it is a matter of unanimity realized from within the effect is to personalize our activities, and, I will add, to make them unerring. A single freedom, taken in isolation, is weak and uncertain and may easily lose itself in mere groping. But a totality of freedom, freely operating, will always end by finding its road. And this incidentally is why throughout this paper, without seeking to minimize the uncertainties inherent in Man’s freedom of choice in relation to the world, I have been able implicitly to maintain that we are moving both freely and ineluctably in the direction of concentration by way of planetization. One might put it that determinism appears at either end of the process of cosmic evolution, but in antithetically opposed forms: at the lower end it is forced along the line of the most probable for lack of freedom ; at the upper end it is an ascent into the improbable through the triumph of freedom.

We may be reassured. The vast industrial and social system by which we are enveloped does not threaten to crush us, neither does it seek to rob us of our soul. The energy emanating from it is free not only in the sense that it represents forces that can be used: it is moreover free because, in the Whole no less than in the least of its elements, it arises out of a state that grows ever more spiritualized. A thinker such as Cournot(Cournot. Considérations sur la Marche des idées a des ÊEvénements dans les Temps modernes. [Réédition Mentré. Vol. II, p. 178]) might still be able to suppose that the socialized group degrades itself biologically in terms of the individuals which comprise it. Only by reaching to the heart of the Noosphere (we see it more clearly today) can we hope, and indeed be sure, of finding, all of us together and each of us separately, the fullness of our humanity.

Revue des Questions Scientifiques (Louvain)January, 1947. pp. 7 -35.

I am no politician and still less a prophet. Like the rest of us I am anxiously following the proceedings at the Peace Conference, this poignant spectacle of the two halves of Mankind wrangling incessantly over points of detail but making no fundamental contact because they approach everything from different angles. How will it all turn out? I do not know.

But I am, if I may be allowed the term, a ‘geo-biologist’, and I have looked hard and long at the face of Mother Earth. I feel and I am convinced of one thing: that nothing is more dangerous for the future of the world, nothing moreover less warranted in Nature, than the affected resignation and false realism with which in these days a great number of people, hunching their shoulders and drawing in their heads, predict (and in so doing tend to provoke) a further catastrophe in the near future. More than all the remnants of hatred lingering between nations, this terror of inevitable war, which sees no cure for warfare except in even greater terror, is responsible for poisoning the air we breathe. That is why, humbly and devoutly echoing a divine utterance, I feel the need to cry to those around me, ‘What do ye fear, O men of little faith?’ Do you not see that the peace which you no longer dare to hope for (when you do not actually scorn it as a myth) is possible and indeed certain, provided you will grasp what the word ‘peace’ means and what it requires of you? Let me beg you to rise for a moment above the dust and smoke obscuring the horizon and gaze with me at the course of the world.

1

In the first place I maintain that peace -- I mean, some form of universal and stable peace -- is possible in human terms. Why should it not be? Of course we can easily pile up arguments and evidence to refute this hopeful view. Historically, there have always been wars, and they have grown more harsh: therefore there will continue to be war till the end of time. Morally, man is evil, and becoming more so as he grows more civilized: what grounds have we for hoping that he will improve? And scientifically, since what characterizes the development of the animal species from its beginning is the struggle for life, how can we expect, mere humans that we are, to escape from this essential biological condition without which there can be neither growth nor progress? I am well aware of the many reasons for skepticism, which as a geo-biologist I have pondered as much as anyone. But I must say frankly that none of them impresses me, because to my mind all are neutralized and finally annulled by a fact of higher importance to which, I do not know why, sociologists seem to pay no attention. I mean the particular and unique structure of the zoological group to which we belong. Until the coming of Man the branches or shoots composing the different living species tended inexorably to diverge and spread ever more widely apart as they developed. With Man, on the other hand, owing to the grand psychological phenomenon of Reflection, the branches of his species follow an entirely different course. Instead of separating and detaching themselves from one another they turn inwards and presently intertwine, so that by degrees, races, peoples, nations merging together, they come to form a sort of uni-conscious super-organism. To eyes that can see, this is what is now happening. And having noted this profound change in the evolutionary process at the human level, how can we fail to see that it changes the whole nature of the problem, so that, in seeking to forecast the development of human society in this matter of war and peace, we cannot simply project the history of the animal world into the future, or even that of the first hundred or two hundred millennia of our own species? Biologically speaking, what has hitherto driven living creatures to mutual destruction has clearly been the necessity which impelled them to supplant one another in order to survive. But why should their survival depend upon their supplanting one another, except for the reason that they existed independently of one another? Ultimately and fundamentally it is the divergence of the living shoots, operating from the highest level down to the family and the individuals composing the family, which has always been the cause of human conflict. But suppose, on the contrary (this is the entirely new development in the case of the human race) that the outspreading and unfolding of forms gradually gives way to a process of in-folding. Then the previous economy of Nature undergoes a radical change: for converging branches do not survive by eliminating each other; they have to unite. Everything that formerly made for war now makes for peace, and the zoological laws of conservation and survival must wear an opposite sign if they are to be applied to Man. The whole phenomenon has been reversed. This may well account for the terrible upheavals we have undergone; not an irresistible increase in the tide of war, but simply a clash of currents: the old disruptive surface forces driving against a merging in the depths which is already taking place. Why not, after all?

2

It is hard to escape the conclusion, looking at things iii this way, that despite all appearances to thc contrary Mankind is not only capable of living in peace but by its very structure cannot fail eventually to achieve peace. Here, of course, we encounter the formidable element of human freedom of action, of which it is endlessly repeated that its unpredictable interference with the established proceedings of Nature threatens constantly to disrupt and frustrate them. But we need to be clear about this. No doubt it is true that up to a point we are free as individuals to resist the trends and demands of Life. But does this mean (it is a very different matter) that we can escape collectively from the fundamental set of the tide? I do not think so. When I consider the inexorable nature of the universal impulse which for more than six hundred million years has ceaselessly promoted the global rise of consciousness on the earth’s surface, driving on through an endlessly multiplying network of opposing hazards; when I reflect upon the irresistible forces (geographical, ethnic, economic and psychic) whose combined effect is to thrust the human mass ever more tightly in upon itself; when finally, on the occasion of some great act of human collaboration or devotion, I perceive as though in a lightning-flash the prodigious, still-slumbering affinity which draws the ‘thinking molecules’ of the world together -- wherever I look I am forced to the same conclusion: that the earth is more likely to stop turning than is Mankind, as a whole, likely to stop organizing and unifying itself. For if this interior movement were to stop, it is the Universe itself, embodied in Man, that would fail to curve inwards and achieve totalization. And nothing, as it seems, can prevent the universe from succeeding -- nothing, not even our human liberties, whose essential tendency to union may fail in detail but cannot (without ‘cosmic contradiction) err ‘statistically’. According to whether one looks at it from the point of view of the isolated unit or in terms of all units taken together, the human synthesis, that is to say, Peace, shows us two complementary faces (like so many other things in this world): first a steep slope, only to be climbed by constant effort in the face of many setbacks; and ultimately the point of balance to which the whole system must inevitably come.

3

Peace therefore is certain: it is only a matter of time. Inevitably, with an inevitability which is nothing but the supreme expression of liberty, we are moving laboriously and self-critically towards it. But what exactly do we mean by this -- what kind of peace? Only a peace, it is perfectly clear, which will allow, express and correspond to what I have called the vital in-folding of Mankind upon itself. A sustained state of growing convergence and concentration, a great organized endeavor: if it is not that kind of peace, then what I have been saying is worthless and we are back with our uncertainties. This means that all hope of bourgeois tranquillity, the dreams of ‘millenary’ felicity in which we may be tempted to indulge, must be washed out, eliminated from our horizon. A perfectly-ordered society with everyone living in effortless ease within a fixed framework, a world in a state of tranquil repose, all this has nothing to do with our advancing Universe, apart from the fact that it would rapidly induce a state of deadly tedium. Although, as I believe, concord must of necessity eventually prevail on earth, it can by our premises only take the form of some sort of tense cohesion pervaded and inspired with the same energies, now become harmonious, which were previously wasted in bloodshed: unanimity in search and conquest, sustained among us by the universal resolve to raise ourselves upwards, all straining shoulder to shoulder, towards ever greater heights of consciousness and freedom. In short, true peace, the only kind that is biologically possible, betokens neither the ending nor the reverse of warfare, but war in a naturally sublimated form. It reflects and corresponds to the normal state of Mankind become at last alive to the possibilities and demands of its evolution.

And here a last question arises, bringing us to the heart of the problem. Why is it, finally, that men are still so painfully incapable of agreeing among themselves; why does the threat of war still appear so menacing? Is it not because they have still not purged themselves sufficiently of the demon of immobilism? Is not the underlying antagonism which separates them at the conference tables quite simply the eternal conflict between motion and inertia, the cleavage between one part of the world that moves and another that does not seek to advance? Let us not forget that faith in peace is not possible, not justifiable, except in a world dominated by faith in the future, faith in Man and the progress of Man. By this token, so long as we are not all of one mind, and with a sufficient degree of ardor, it will be useless for us to seek to draw together and unite. We shall only fail.

That is why, when I look for reassurance as to our future, I do not turn to official utterances, or ‘pacifist’ manifestations, or conscientious objectors. I turn instinctively towards the ever more numerous institutions and associations of men where in the search for knowledge a new spirit is silently taking shape around us -- the soul of Mankind resolved at all costs to achieve, in its total integrity, the uttermost fulfillment of its powers and its destiny.

Cahiers du Monde Nouveau, January 1947.

One early dawn in the ‘bad lands’ of Arizona, something over a year ago, a dazzling flash of light, strangely brilliant in quality, illumined the most distant peaks, eclipsing the first rays of the rising sun. There followed a prodigious burst of sound. . . . The thing had happened. For the first time on earth an atomic fire had burned for the space of a second, industriously kindled by the science of Man.

But having thus realized his dream of creating a new thunderclap, Man, stunned by his success, looked inward and sought by the glare of the lightning his own hand had loosed to understand its effect upon himself. His body was safe; but what had happened to his soul?

I shall not seek to discuss or defend the essential morality of this act of releasing atomic energy. There were those, on the morrow of the Arizona experiment, who had the temerity to assert that the physicists, having brought their researches to a successful conclusion, should have suppressed and destroyed the dangerous fruits of their invention. As though it were not every man’s duty to pursue the creative forces of knowledge and action to their uttermost end! As though, in any event, there exists any force on earth capable of restraining human thought from following any course upon which it has embarked!

Neither shall I here attempt to examine the economic and political problems created by the intrusion of nuclear energy upon human affairs. How is the use of this terrifying power to be organized and controlled? This is for the worldly technicians to answer. It is sufficient for me to recall the general condition which is necessary for the solution of the problem: it must be posed on an international scale. As the American journal, The New Yorker, observed with remarkable penetration on August 18th, 1945: ‘Political plans for the new world, as shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic enough. The only conceivable way to catch up with atomic energy is with political energy directed to a universal structure.’

The aim of these reflections -- more narrowly concerned with our separate souls, but for that reason perhaps going deeper -- is simply to examine, in the case of the atomic bomb, the effects of the invention upon the inventor, arising out of the fact of the invention. Each of our actions, and the more so the more novel the action, has its deep-seated repercussions upon our subsequent inner orientation. To fly, to beget, to kill for the first time -- these, as we know, suffice to transform a life. By the liberation of atomic energy on a massive scale, and for the first time, man has not only changed the face of the earth; he has by the very act set in motion at the heart of his being a long chain of reactions which, in the brief flash of an explosion of matter, has made of him, virtually at least, a new being hitherto unknown to himself.

Let me try, in a first approximation, to distinguish the main links in this chain.

a At that crucial instant when the explosion was about to happen (or not happen) the first artificers of the atom bomb were crouched on the soil of the desert. When they got to their feet after it was over, it was Mankind who stood up with them, instilled with a new sense of power. Certainly the power was of a kind which Man had many times felt emanating from himself, in great pulsations, during the course of his history. He had felt it, for example, in the darkness of the paleolithic age when for the first time he ventured to put fire to his own use, or accidentally discovered how to produce it; in neolithic times when he found that by cultivating thin ears of grass he could turn them into rice and millet and corn; and much later, at the dawn of our industrial era, when he found that he could tame and harness not only animals but the tireless energies of steam and electricity. Each of these new conquests signified extensively and intensively, for Man and for the earth, a total rearrangement of life, a change of epoch; but when all is said they did not bring about any essential change of plane in the depths of human consciousness. For in all these cases (even the most beneficial, that of electricity), what did the discovery lead to except the control and utilization of forces already at liberty in the surrounding world? They called for ingenuity and adaptiveness rather than any act of creation; they were no more, in each case, than a new sail hoisted to catch a new wind. But the discovery and liberation of atomic power bears quite another aspect and in consequence has had a very different effect upon Man’s soul. Here it is no longer a question of laying hands upon existing forces freely available for his use. This time a door has been decidedly forced open, giving access to a new and supposedly inviolable compartment of the universe. Hitherto Man was using matter to serve his needs. Now he has succeeded in seizing and manipulating the sources commanding the very origins of matter -- springs so deep that he can release for his own purposes what seemed to be the exclusive property of the sidereal powers, and so powerful that he must think twice before committing some act which might destroy the earth. In the glow of this triumph how can he feel otherwise than exalted as he has never been since his birth; the more so since the prodigious event is not the mere accidental product of a futureless chance but the long-prepared outcome of intelligently concerted action?

b Therefore, a new sense of power: but even more, the sense of a power capable of development to an indefinite extent. What gripped the throats of those bold experimenters in Arizona, in that minute before the explosion, must surely have been far less the thought of the destruction it might lead to than of the critical test which the pyramid of calculation and hypothesis culminating in this solemn moment was about to undergo. The quicker ending of the war, the vast sums of money spent -- what did such things matter when the very worth of science itself was on trial? That vast and subtle edifice of equations. experiments, inter-woven calculations put together little by little in the laboratories, would it survive the test of this culminating experiment which would make of it, in everyday terms, something tangible, efficacious, unanswerable? Was it a dream or reality? This was the moment of truth. In a few instants they would know.

And the flame truly sprang upwards at the place and time prescribed, energy did indeed burst forth from what, to ordinary perception, was inert, non-inflammable matter. Man at that moment found himself endowed not merely with his existing strength but with a method which would enable him to master all the forces surrounding him. For one thing he had acquired absolute and final confidence in the instrument of mathematical analysis which for the past century he had been forging. Not only could matter be expressed in terms of mathematics, it could be subjugated by mathematics. Perhaps even more important, he had discovered, in the unconsidered unanimity of the act which circumstances had forced upon him, another secret pointing the way to his omnipotence. For the first time m history, through the non-fortuitous conjunction of a world crisis and an unprecedented advance in means of communication, a planned scientific experiment employing units of a hundred or a thousand men had been successfully completed. And very swiftly. In three years a technical achievement had been realized which might not have been accomplished in a century of isolated efforts. Thus greatest of Man’s scientific triumphs happens also to be the one in which the largest number of brains were enabled to join together in a single organism, the most complex and the most centrated, for the purpose of research. Was this simply coincidence? Did it not rather show that in this as in other fields nothing in the universe can resist the converging energies of a sufficient number of minds sufficiently grouped and organized?

Thus considered, the fact of the release of nuclear energy, overwhelming and intoxicating though it was, began to seem less tremendous. Was it not simply the first act, even a mere prelude, in a series of fantastic events which, having afforded us access to the heart of the atom, would lead us on to overthrow, one by one, the many other strongholds which science is already besieging? The vitalization of matter by the creation of super-molecules. The re-modeling of the human organism by means of hormones. Control of heredity and sex by the manipulation of genes and chromosomes. The readjustment and internal liberation of our souls by direct action upon springs gradually brought to light by psycho-analysis. The arousing and harnessing of the unfathomable intellectual and effective powers still latent in the human mass. . . . Is not every kind of effect produced by a suitable arrangement of matter? And have we not reason to hope that in the end we shall be able to arrange every kind of matter, following the results we have obtained in the nuclear field?

c It is thus, step by step, that Man, pursuing the flight of his growing aspirations, taught by a first success to be conscious of his power, finds himself impelled to look beyond any purely mechanical improvement of the earth’s surface and increase of his external riches, and to dwell upon the growth and biological perfection of himself. A vast accumulation of historical research and imaginative reconstruction already existed to teach him this. For millions of years a tide of knowledge has risen ceaselessly about him through the stuff of the cosmos; and that in him which he calls his ‘I’ is nothing other than this tide atomically turning inward upon itself. This he knew already; but without knowing to what extent he could render effective aid to the flood of life pouring through him. But now, after that famous sunrise in Arizona, he can no longer doubt. He not only can but, of organic necessity, he must for the future assist in his own becoming. The first phase was the creation of mind through the obscure, instinctive play of vital forces. The second phase is the rebounding and acceleration of the upward movement through the reflexive play of mind itself, the only principle in the world capable of combining and using for the purposes of Life, and on the planetary scale, the still-dispersed or slumbering energies of matter and of thought. It is broadly in these terms that we are obliged henceforth to envisage the grand scheme of things of which, by the fact of our existence, we find ourselves a part.

So that today there exists in each of us a man whose mind has been opened to the meaning, the responsibility and the aspirations of his cosmic function in the universe; a man, that is to say, who whether he likes it or not has been transformed into another man, in his very depths.

d The great enemy of the modern world, ‘Public Enemy No. I’, is boredom. So long as Life did not think, and above all did not have time to think -- that is to say, while it was still developing and absorbed with the immediate struggle to maintain itself and advance -- it was untroubled by questions as to the value and interest of action. Only when a margin of leisure for reflection came to intervene between the task and its execution did the workman experience the first pangs of taedium vitae. But in these days the margin is immeasurably greater, so that it fills our horizon. Thanks to the mechanical devices which we increasingly charge with the burden not only of production but also of calculation, the quantity of unused human energy is growing at a disturbing rate both within us and around us; and this phenomenon will reach its climax in the near future, when nuclear forces have been harnessed to useful work. I repeat: despite all appearances, Mankind is bored. Perhaps this is the underlying cause of all our troubles. We no longer know what to do with ourselves. Hence in social terms the disorderly turmoil of individuals pursuing conflicting and egotistical aims; and, on the national scale, the chaos of armed conflict in which, for want of a better object, the excess of accumulated energy is destructively released . . . ‘Idleness, mother of all vices.’

But these lowering storm clouds are what the Sense of Evolution, arising in human consciousness, is destined to disperse. Whatever may be the future economic repercussions of the atom bomb, whether over- or under-estimated, the fact remains that in laying hands on the very core of matter we have disclosed to human existence a supreme purpose: the purpose of pursuing ever further, to the very end, the forces of Life. In exploding the atom we took our first bite at the fruit of the great discovery, and this was enough for a taste to enter our mouths that can never be washed away: the taste for super-creativeness. It was also enough to ensure that the nightmare of bloody combat must vanish in the light of some form of growing unanimity. We are told that, drunk with its own power, mankind is rushing to self-destruction, that it will be consumed in the fire it has so rashly lit. To me it seems that thanks to the atom bomb it is war, not mankind, that is destined to be eliminated, and for two reasons. The first, which we all know and long for, is that the very excess of destructive power placed in our hands must render all armed conflict impossible. But what is even more important, although we have thought less about it, is that war will be eliminated at its source in our hearts because, compared with the vast field for conquest which science has disclosed to us, its triumphs will soon appear trivial and outmoded. Now that a true objective is offered us, one that we can only attain by striving with all our power in a concerted effort, our future action can only be convergent, drawing us together in an atmosphere of sympathy. I repeat, sympathy, because to be ardently intent upon a common object is inevitably the beginning of love. In affording us a biological, ‘phyletic’ outlet directed upwards, the shock which threatened to destroy us will have the effect of re-orienting us, of instilling a new dynamic and finally (within certain limits) of making us one whole. The atomic age is not the age of destruction but of union in research. For all their military trappings, the recent explosions at Bikini herald the birth into the world of a Mankind both inwardly and outwardly pacified. They proclaim the coming of the Spirit of the Earth.

e We are at the point where, if we are to restore complete equilibrium to the state of psychic disarray which the atomic shock has induced in us, we must sooner or later (sooner?) decide upon our attitude to a fundamental choice; the point where our conflicts may begin again, and fiercely, but by other means and on a different plane.

I spoke of the Spirit of the Earth. What are we to understand by that ambiguous phrase?

Is it the Promethean or Faustian spirit: the spirit of autonomy and solitude; Man with his own strength and for his own sake opposing a blind and hostile Universe; the rise of consciousness concluding in an act of possession?

Is it the Christian spirit, on the contrary: the spirit of service and of giving; Man struggling like Jacob to conquer and attain a supreme center of consciousness which calls to him; the evolution of the earth ending in an act of union?

Spirit of force or spirit of love? Where shall we place true heroism, where look for true greatness, where recognize objective truth?

It would take too long, and it is outside the scope of this paper, to discuss the comparative worth of two opposed forms of adoration, the first of which may well have attracted poets, but only the second of which, I think, presents itself to the reflective mind as capable of conferring upon a universe in motion its full spiritual coherence, its total substance beyond death, and finally its whole message for our hearts.(Witnesses of that experiment in Arizona found, in the anguish of the last instants, that in the depths of their hearts they were praying. [Official Report: appendices.])

What does matter here is to note that Mankind cannot go much further along the road upon which it has embarked through its latest conquests without having to settle (or be divided intellectually on) the question of which summit it must seek to attain.

In short, the final effect of the light cast by the atomic fire into the spiritual depths of the earth is to illumine within them the over-riding question of the ultimate end of Evolution -- that is to say, the problem of God.

Ètudes, September 1946.

Argument

Underlying all the surface-changes of present-day history, the reality and paramount importance of a single basic event is becoming daily more manifest: namely, the rise of the masses, with its natural corollary, the socialization of Mankind. The supreme interest and significance of this process lies in the fact that, scientifically analyzed, it may be seen to be irresistible in two ways: in the planetary sense, because it is associated with the closed shape of the earth, the mechanics of generation and the psychic properties of human matter; and in the cosmic sense because it is the expression and prolongation of the primordial process whereby, at the uttermost extreme from the disintegrating atom, psychic force is born into the Universe and continuously grows, fostered by the ever more complicated grouping of matter. Projected forwards, this law of recurrence makes it possible for us to envisage a future state of the Earth in which human consciousness, reaching the climax of its evolution, will have attained a maximum of complexity, and, as a result, of concentration by total ‘reflection’ (or planetization) of itself upon itself.

Although our individualistic instincts may rebel against this drive towards the collective, they do so in vain and wrongly. In vain, because no power in the world can enable us to escape from what is in itself the power of the world. And wrongly because the real nature of this impulse that is sweeping us towards a state of super-organization is such as to make us more completely personalized and human.

The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion.

Preamble

It has become very difficult, in the world’s present state of upheaval and distraction, to form any idea of the significance of what is going on except, by rising above the individual level. So many opposing forces (ideas, passions, institutions, peoples) meet and clash around us that to the thinking person it may well appear that the human ship is rudderless in the storm. Are we going ahead or astern, or are we simply hove-to? No means of telling while we remain at sea-level: the waves hide the horizon.

I can see only one way of escape from this state of uncertainty which threatens to paralyze all positive action: we must rise above the storm, the chaos of surface detail, and from a higher vantage-point look for the outline of some great and significant phenomenon. That is what I have tried to do, and it has led me to accept, however improbable they may appear, the reality and the consequences of the major cosmic process which, for want of a better name, I have called ‘human planetization’.

Despite appearances and a certain overlapping due to the vastness of the subject (as we draw near to the Whole, physics, metaphysics and religion strangely converge) I am prepared to maintain that what I have to say does not anywhere go beyond the field of scientific observation. What this essay claims to offer is not philosophical speculation but an extension of our biological perspective -- no more, and no less.

1. An Irresistible Physical Process: The Collectivization of Mankind

We might suppose, if we set out to examine the state of things on the morrow of the most fearful convulsion that has ever shaken the living stratum of the Earth, that we should find the soil mined and fissured to its depths. So great a shock must surely have exposed all the points of weakness, unloosed all the forces of dispersal and divergence and left Mankind shattered within itself. This is what we might expect to find.

But instead of this state of universal ruin, and if we disregard the psychological haze of fatigue and resentment which, as I shall show, is only a passing phase, what do we actually see?

Geographically, since 1939 a vast expanse of the earth, the region of the Pacific, hitherto on the fringe of civilization, has for practical purposes entered irrevocably into the orbit of industrialized nations. Mechanized masses of men have invaded the southern seas, and up-to-date airfields have been permanently installed on what were until yesterday the poetically lost islands of Polynesia.

Ethnically, during the same period, there has been a vast and pitiless confusion of peoples, whole armies being removed from one hemisphere to the other, and tens of thousands of refugees being scattered across the world like seed borne on the wind. Brutal and harsh though the circumstances have been, who can fail to perceive the inevitable consequences of this new stirring of the human dough?

And economically and psychically the entire mass of Mankind, under the inexorable pressure of events and owing to the prodigious growth and speeding up of the means of communication, has found itself seized in the mould of a communal existence -- large sections tightly encased in countless international organizations, the most ambitious the world has ever known; and the whole anxiously involved in the same passionate upheavals, the same problems, the same daily news. . . . Can anyone seriously suppose that we shall be able to rid ourselves of habits such as these?

No; during these six years, despite the unleashing of so much hatred, the human block has not disintegrated. On the contrary, in its most rigid organic depths it has further increased its vice-like grip upon us all. First 1914-1918, then 1939-1945 -- two successive turns of the screw. Every new war, embarked upon by the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot. The more we seek to thrust each other away, the more do we interpenetrate.

Indeed, how could it be otherwise?

Confined within the geometrically restricted surface of the globe, which is steadily reduced as their own radius of activity increases, the human particles do not merely multiply in numbers at an increasing rate, but through contact with one another automatically develop around themselves an ever denser tangle of economic and social relationships. Moreover, being each exposed at the core of their being to the countless spiritual influences emanating from the thought, the will and the passions of all their fellow-creatures they find themselves constantly subjected in spirit to an enforced rule of resonance. It must surely be clear that, under the pressure of these relentless factors -- relentless because they are a part of the deepest and most generalized conditions of the planetary structure -- there is only one way in which the tide can flow: the way of ever-increasing unification. In speculating on the earthly destiny of Man we are accustomed to say that in the ultimate future nothing is certain, except that a day must come when our planet will be uninhabitable. But for those who are not afraid to look ahead, another thing awaits us that is no less certain. As the Earth grows older, so does its living skin contract, and even more rapidly. The last day of Man will coincide for Mankind with the maximum of its tightening and in-folding upon itself.

I know that to see determinisms everywhere in history may be to over-simplify and is certainly dangerous. Every so often authoritative voices are raised protesting that there is no fateful significance in the rise of the masses, or the leveling of classes or the growth of democracy. Where details and modalities are concerned, these defenders of individual liberty are often right. But they go astray, or will do so, if in their proper spirit of opposition to everything that is passive and blind in the world they seek to close their eyes, and ours, to the over-riding super-determinism which irresistibly impels Mankind to converge upon itself.

Whether we like it or not, from the beginning of our history and through all the interconnected forces of Matter and Spirit, the process of our collectivization has ceaselessly continued, slowly or in jerks, gaining ground each day. That is the fact of the matter. It is as impossible for Mankind not to unite upon itself as it is for the human intelligence not to go on indefinitely deepening its thought! . . . Instead of seeking, against all the evidence, to deny or disparage the reality of this grand phenomenon, we do better to accept it frankly. Let us look it in the face and see whether, using it as an unassailable foundation, we cannot erect upon it a hopeful edifice of joy and liberation.

2. The One Possible Interpretation: A Super-organization of the Matter around Us

To understand the significance of the world forces of collectivization, and what it is that they so imperiously demand of us, we need to look down from a great height and contemplate, in their widest, most general aspect, the organic relationships linking consciousness and complexity within the Universe.

It would seem that Man, observing it with curiosity, has always been aware of the law of compensation whereby, in every circumstance of nature, the most highly spiritualized souls are associated with the most corruptible and intricate bodies. But it has remained for modern biology and biochemistry to disclose this contrast, which lay observation could do no more than perceive, in all its persistence and sharpness. We marvel, in the light of recent developments of microscopic and chemical analysis, at the formidable edifice of atoms and varied mechanisms which is found to exist in living creatures, the more living they are. How has it happened that, faced by this constant balance between physical plurality and psychic unity, we have been so slow to grasp the possibility of a physical link of causality connecting them? Hints of the existence of such a link are today beginning to crop up everywhere in scientific works. Let me venture, in a schematic and personal way, to interpret this line of inquiry which, explicitly or by implication, is gradually attracting the notice of philosophers and scientists.

Before doing anything else we must dismiss from our picture of the world the factitious barrier which, to ordinary perception, separates the so-called inanimate corpuscles (atoms, molecules, etc.) from living corpuscles or bodies. That is to say, we must assume, on the strength of their common behavior (multiplicity in similarity) that all, in their varied degrees of complexity and magnitude, are manifestations of a single, fundamental, granular structural principle of the Universe -- simply larger or smaller particles.

And having done this let us postulate in principle that consciousness (like such phenomena as the variation of mass according to speed, or radiation as a function of temperature) is a universal property common to all the corpuscles constituting the Universe, but varying in proportion to the complexity of any particular molecule: which amounts to saying that the degree of psychism, the ‘within’, of the different elements composing the world will be small or great, according to the place of the element in the astronomically extended scale of complexities at present known to us.

The effect of this double modification is to transform our perception of things. Hitherto, in the eyes of a Science too much accustomed to reconstruct the world on one spatial axis extending in a line from the infinitely small to the infinitely great, the larger molecules of organic chemistry, and still more the living cellular composites, have existed without any defined position, like wandering stars, in the general scheme of cosmic elements. Now however, simply by the introduction of another dimension, a new order and definition become apparent. Traversing the rising axis from the infinitesimal to the immense another branch appears, rising through Time from the infinitely simple to the supremely complicated. It is on this branch that the consciousness-phenomenon has its place and eventually shows itself. There is first a long, obscure stretch which seems dead but is in fact ‘imperceptibly alive’. Then, at the stage of corpuscles reaching a million atoms in their complexity (viruses), we come to the first flush heralding the dawn of Life. Later, after the cell, there is a definite radiation growing richer and more intense with the formation and gradual concentration of nervous systems. And finally, at the extreme end of the known spectrum, comes the thinking incandescence of the human brain.

By this re-ordering of things, not only does Life, despite its extreme rarity and localization in Space, show itself, in symmetry with atomic disintegration, to be a fundamental universal current (the current); not only does Man, with his billions of interacting nervous cells, find a natural, cosmically enrooted place in this generalized physical scheme; but something begins to take shape ahead of Man. Once again we find ourselves confronted by the forces of collectivization.

Owing to an inhibition, inherent in our mentality, which prevents us from looking squarely at collectivity, ‘commonsense’ has long refused to accept any but superficial analogies between the ‘moral or artificial’ sphere of human institutions and the ‘physical’ sphere of organized Nature. Indeed, it is only very recently, and as yet timidly, that sociology has ventured to set up the first bridges between biology and itself. But once we have accepted the general Law of Recurrence linking the growth of consciousness to the advance of complexity within a process of universal evolution, nothing can arrest the logical sequence in which two worlds which we were accustomed to regard as being completely separate are seen to approach and complement each other. We see Nature combining molecules and cells in the living body to construct separate individuals, and the same Nature, stubbornly pursuing the same course but on a higher level, combining individuals in social organisms to obtain a higher order of psychic results. The processes of chemistry and biology are continued without a break in the social sphere. This accounts for the tendency, which has been insufficiently noted, of every living phylum (insect and vertebrate) to group itself towards its latter end in socialized communities. Above all, in the case of Man (the only living species in which the variety, quality and intensity of individual relationships enables the phenomenon to achieve its full extent) it explains the rapid psychic rise accompanying socialization, which takes the following forms:

a the growth of a collective memory in which a common inheritance of Mankind is amassed in the form of accumulated experience and passed on through education;

b the development, through the increasingly rapid transmission of thought, of what is in effect a generalized nervous system, emanating from certain defined centers and covering the entire surface of the globe;

c the growth, though the interaction and ever-increasing concentration of individual viewpoints, of a faculty of common vision penetrating beyond the continuous and static world of popular conception into a fantastic but still manageable world of atomized energy.

All round us, tangibly and materially, the thinking envelope of the Earth -- the Noosphere -- is adding to its internal fibers and tightening its network; and at the same time its internal temperature is rising, and with this its psychic potential. These two associated portents allow of no misunderstanding. What is really going on, under cover and in the form of human collectivization, is the super-organization of Matter upon itself, which as it continues to advance produces its habitual, specific effect, the further liberation of consciousness. It is all one and the same process. And, by very reason of the elements involved, the process cannot achieve stability until, over the entire globe, the human quantum has not merely closed the circle upon itself (as it is doing at this moment, in a penultimate phase) but has become organically totalized.

So what finally lies ahead of us is a planetary arrangement of human mass and energy, coinciding with a maximal radiation of thought -- at once the external and internal ‘planetization’ of Mankind. That is what we are inexorably headed for, in the tightening embrace of the social determinisms. The Earth could more easily evade the pressures which cause it to contract upon itself, the stars more readily escape from the spatial curve which holds them on their courses, than we men can resist the cosmic forces of a converging universe!

And why should we seek to resist these unifying forces which are essentially benevolent? Is it because we are afraid that in the process of super-creation they will render us less human?

The basic characteristic of Man, the root of all his perfections, is his gift of awareness in the second degree. Man not only knows; he knows that he knows. He reflects. But this power of reflection, when restricted to the individual, is only partial and rudimentary. As Nietzsche has rightly observed, although he put the wrong construction on it, the individual, faced by himself alone, cannot fulfill himself. It is only when opposed to other men that he can discover his own depth and wholeness. However personal and incommunicable it may be at its root and origin, Reflection can only be developed in communion with others. It is essentially a social phenomenon. What can this mean except that its eventual completion and wholeness must exactly coincide (in full accord with the Law of Complexity) with what we have called the planetization of Mankind?

Some hundreds of thousands of years ago Consciousness achieved the stage of its own centration, and thus the power of thought, in a brain that had reached the limit of nervous complication: this was the first stage in the hominization of Life on earth.

In due course, after the passage of further thousands or even millions of years, it can, and it must, super-centrate itself in the bosom of a Mankind totally reflexive upon itself.

Instead of vainly opposing or meekly submitting to the creative forces of the planet which bears us, should we not rather let our lives be illumined and broadened in the growing light of this second stage of hominization?

3. The Only Permissible Inward Reaction: A Sense of Evolution

A remarkable change overtakes the process of zoological evolution at the level of Man. Until that point was reached every animal, feebly separated from its fellows, existed largely for the purpose of preserving and developing its own species, so that for the individual life was primarily a matter of propagation. But from the time of Man a sort of internal granulation seems to attack the Tree of Life, causing it to disintegrate at the top. With the dawning of Reflection each conscious unit isolates itself and, one would say, tends increasingly to live only for itself, as though, by the fact of hominization, the phylum were broken up into individuals; and as though, in the hominized individual, the phyletic sense were submerged until it finally vanishes.

It is to this alarming course of psychic decomposition, and at the very moment when it seems to be reaching its crisis, that the prospect of a human planetary fulfillment brings the appropriate remedy. If, as we have shown, the social phenomenon is not merely a blind determinism but the portent, the inception of a second phase of human Reflexion (this time not merely individual but collective), then it must mean that the phylum is reconstituting itself above our heads in a new form, a new ramification, no longer of divergence but of convergence; and consequently it is the Sense of Evolution which, suppressing the spirit of egoism, is of its own right springing to new life in our hearts, and in such a way as to counteract those elements in the forces of collectivization which are poisonous to Life.

That the construction of super-organisms is a hazardous operation (like all Life’s major transactions) is something of which we find ample evidence in the study of animal colonies, or, where Man is concerned, the spectacle afforded by recent totalitarian experiments. We are alarmed by all forms of communized existence, and not without reason, because they seem automatically to entail the loss or mutilation of our individual personality. But may it not be that our fear of a process of mechanization seemingly fatal to our active growth arises simply from the fact that we have left the most important element out of our reckoning? In the foregoing paragraphs I have deliberately, for the sake of objectivity, looked only at the external or enforced aspect of human planetization. Thus far we have taken no account of the internal reactions to be expected of planetized matter. But what happens if we consider the ‘planetizing’ process as applied not merely to a passive substratum but to a human mass inspired with the Sense of Evolution? What we then see is a flood of sympathetic forces, spreading from the heart of the system, which transforms the whole nature of the phenomenon: sympathy in the first place (an act of quasi-adoration) on the part of all the elements gathered together for the general impulse that carries them along; and also the sympathy (this time fraternal) of each separate element for all that is most unique and incommunicable in each of the co-elements with which it converges in the unity, not only of a single act of vision but of a single living subject. But to say ‘love’ is to say ‘liberty’. There need be no fear of enslavement or atrophy in a world so richly charged with charity!

Therefore, provided it be accompanied by a revival of the phyletic sense, the collectivization of the Earth shows itself to be the true instrument, not merely of cerebral super-hominization but of complete humanization. By interiorizing itself under the influence of the Sense of Evolution, planetization (as the theory of complexity would lead us to expect) can physically have but one effect: it can only personalize us more and more, and eventually (as can be demonstrated by following to their conclusion all the successive stages of its twofold demand for wholeness and irreversibility) ‘divinize us through access to some Supreme Center of universal convergence.

But the question arises, will this universal Sense of Evolution (the necessary antidote and natural reaction to the growth of complexity in a world that has reached the stage of Reflexion) come when it is needed? Will it flower in time to ensure that, arrived at the point of super-humanity, we avoid dehumanizing ourselves? Theory may predict its imminent appearance: but have we in fact specific reasons for believing that it will truly awaken at the expected moment in the hearts of our fellow-men?

4. Deeper than Our Present Discords: Mankind in the Re-shaping

Although in terms of its biological, economic and mental determinisms the human earth, emerging from war, may be seen to be more tightly fastened upon itself than ever before, in its other and freer aspects it may give a first impression of growing disorder. As I said at the beginning, a thick fog of confusion and dissension is at present drifting over the world. Indeed one might say that men have never more vehemently rebuffed and detested one another than they do now, when everything drives them closer together. Is this state of moral chaos really to be reconciled with the idea and the hope that we are advancing towards unanimity through the closer contact of our bodies and minds?

Let us look at things more closely to see whether, even in those troubled regions of the heart, there may not be gleams of light heralding the planetization of Mankind.

Traced in broad outline the ‘psychic’ map of the world would show on its surface a mosaic of vertically separated compartments (ethnical, political, religious) whereas in depth a loosening surface, symbolizing class-antagonism, would separate the human mass into two thicknesses over its entire planetary extent. Such is the tangled skein which the war has inevitably thrown into relief. Within these ancient or recent lines of division, the tightening-np of the world could not fail to cause upheaval and explosion in the Noosphere. But what effect has it had in younger and more elastic zones?

A new substance has recently appeared in the heart of the thinking ‘magma’ -- a new element, not yet catalogued but of supreme importance: We might call it Homo progressivus, that is to say, the man to whom the terrestrial future matters more than the present. A new type of man indeed, when we consider that, less than two hundred years ago, the notion of an organic evolution of the World in Time had acquired neither form nor substance in the human mind. When we come to look for them, men of this sort are easily recognizable. They are scientists, thinkers, airmen and so on -- all those possessed by the demon (or the angel) of Research. Let us try to plot their statistical distribution on our imaginary map. The diagram turns out to have some remarkable features.

In the first place, points denoting this new human type will be found to be scattered more or less all over the thinking face of the globe. Although more numerous among the white peoples, and tending towards the lower social class, they will appear, at least occasionally, in every compartment into which the human race is divided. Their emergence is clearly related to some phenomenon of a noospheric kind.

Secondly, some apparent attraction draws these scattered elements together and causes them to unite among themselves. You have only to take two men, in any gathering, endowed with this mysterious sense of the future. They will gravitate instinctively towards one another in the crowd; they will know one another.

But the third characteristic, the most noteworthy of all, is that this meeting and grouping together is not confined to individuals belonging to the same category or having the same origins, that is to say, belonging to the same compartment within the Noosphere. No racial, social or religious barrier seems to be effective against this force of attraction. I myself have experienced this a hundred times, and anyone who chooses can do the same. Regardless of the country, creed or social status of the person I approach, provided the same flame of expectation burns in us both, there is a profound, definitive and total contact instantly established between us. It matters nothing that differences of education or training cause us to express our hopes in different ways. We feel that we are of the same kind, and we find that our very differences are a common armor, as though there were a dimension of life in which all striving makes for nearness, not only within a corporate body but heart to heart.

I believe that these various characteristics can be accounted for in only one way. We have to accept that, accelerated by the successive intellectual and social upheavals that have shaken the world during the past century and a half, a radical process of differentiation and segregation is taking place within the human mass. And it is following precisely the course we would expect: the spontaneous individualization and separation of that which moves and rises from that which remains immobile; the irresistible multiplication and aggregation, over the whole extent of the globe, of elements activated by a (hominized) reawakening of the phyletic sense; the gradual formation and emergence, at variance with most former categories, of a new noospheric zone m which human collectivization, hitherto enforced, is at last entering its sympathetic phase under the influence of the newly manifest Sense of Evolution.

It would seem, then, that the grand phenomenon which we are now witnessing represents a new and possibly final division of Mankind, based no longer on wealth but on belief in progress.

The old Marxist conflict between producers and exploiters becomes out-dated -- at the best a misplaced approximation. What finally divides the men of today into two camps is not class but an attitude of mind -- the spirit of movement. On the one hand there are those who simply wish to make the world a comfortable dwelling-place; on the other hand, those who can only conceive of it as a machine for progress -- or better, an organism that is progressing. On the one hand the ‘bourgeois spirit’ in its essence, and on the other the true ‘toilers of the Earth’, those of whom we may safely predict that, without violence or hatred, simply by biological predominance, they will tomorrow constitute the human race. On one hand the cast-offs; on the other, the agents and elements of planetization.

Peking, 25 December 1945. Cahiers du Monde Nouveau, August-September 1946.

During the five years that the Earth has trembled beneath our feet, its vast human masses splitting and reforming, we have begun to be conscious of the fact that we are in the grip of forces many millions of times transcending our individual liberties. For even the most positivist and realist among us the evidence is growing that the present crisis far exceeds the economic and political factors which seemed to provoke it, and within the framework of which we may have hoped that it would remain confined. This conflict is no merely localized and temporary affair, a matter of periodical readjustment between nations. The events we are witnessing and undergoing are unquestionably bound up with the general evolution of terrestrial life; they are of planetary dimensions. It is therefore on the planetary scale that they must be assessed, and it is in these terms that I ask you to consider them, so that we may better understand, better endure, and, I will add, better love these things greater than ourselves which are taking place around us and sweeping us along in their course.

What does the world-adventure upon which we are embarked look like, when we seek to interpret it both objectively and hopefully in the light of the widest, soundest and most modern concepts of astronomy, geology and biology? That is what I propose to discuss here: not from the viewpoint of Sirius, as the saying is -- that is to say, with the lofty detachment of an observer seeing things from so far off that they fail to touch him -- but with the anxious intensity of a son of Earth who draws back in order to be able to see more deeply into the matter and spirit of a movement upon which his happiness depends.

This lecture is divided into three parts:

One. The place of living planets in the Universe. Smallness and vastness.

Two. The place of Man on the planet Earth -- at the head.

Three. The place of our generation -- our own place -- in the evolution of Mankind. Assessment.

And finally a summing-up: the end of planetary life. Death or escape?

Let us begin.

I. Living Planets in the Universe

1. From the point of view of the Immense: the apparent insignificance of the earth

From what we now know of astronomy the planets would seem at first sight to be a perfectly insignificant and negligible element in the universe as a whole. How does the sidereal universe look to the eyes of modern science? No doubt you have gazed up at the sky on a fine winter’s night and, like innumerable human beings before you, had an impression of a serene and tranquil firmament twinkling with a profusion of small, friendly lights, all apparently at the same distance from yourself. But telescopic and spectroscopic observation, and increasingly exact calculations, are transforming this comfortable spectacle into a vision that is very much more unsettling, one which in all probability will profoundly affect our moral outlook and religious beliefs when it has passed from the minds of a few initiates into the mass-consciousness of Mankind as a whole: immensities of distance and size, huge extremes of temperature, torrents of energy. . . .

That we may better understand what the earth means, we must try to penetrate, step by step, within this ‘infinity’.

First, the stars.

The stars constitute the natural sidereal unit. It is towards them therefore, the analysis of their structure and the study of their distribution, that the researches of astrophysics are principally directed. The process of research is one based entirely on the analysis of light, calling for miracles of patience, ability and acumen; but it is astonishingly fruitful, since it enables exact measurements to be made of the mass, energy, diameter, distance and movement of objects vast in themselves but ultra-microscopic to us because of their remoteness.

The first thing to note is that, in certain aspects, the stars seem to vary a great deal among themselves. Certain of them, the ‘red giants’, are of colossal dimensions, their diameter exceeding 450 times that of the Sun (if the sun were as large as they it would extend beyond Earth, Jupiter and Saturn as far as Uranus!) Others, the ‘white dwarfs’, are smaller than the earth; and still others, the most numerous category, closely resemble the sun both in their dimensions and their yellow colour. We find similar contrasts of brilliance and temperature. One star may be the equivalent of 300,000 suns in luminosity, whereas another may amount to only a fifty-thousandth part of it (as great a difference, the astronomer Sir James Jeans observed, as there is between a lighthouse and a glow-worm). These, of course, are extreme cases. In the matter of surface-temperature, if the Sun and the majority of stars are round about 6,000˚ Centigrade (three times the temperature of an electric arc) there are some of 11,000˚ (Sirius) and even of 23,000˚; and on the other hand there are some as low as 3,500˚ (the red giants).

But beneath this great diversity, which is due principally to the varying ages of the stars, there is concealed a sort of deep identity. Whether giants, medium-sized or dwarfs, the stars are curiously similar in mass (from one to ten times the mass of the sun), which proves, incidentally, that they must vary prodigiously in their mean density -- 1.4 in the case of the Sun, but 50,000 and even 300,000 in the case of the dwarf stars (a fragment the size of a pinch of snuff, brought from one of these to Earth, would weigh a ton!)

So we have approximate identity of mass, and therefore calibration. If we now consider the number of the stars (15,000 x 10⁶ visible to the optical telescope alone) you will understand how it is possible to say, cosmically speaking, that we are enveloped in a sort of monstrous gas formed of molecules as heavy as the Sun moving at distances from each other so great that they have to be reckoned in light-years (bearing in mind that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, and that we are only 8 light-minutes distant from the sun) -- a gas made of stars!

A gas of stars. The very conjunction of the two words is startling. But the shock is even greater when we learn that these myriads of suns scattered in the void are no more than the grains forming a super-grain of infinitely greater magnitude, and that this in its turn is no more than one unit amid a myriad of similar units! Imagination is confounded. . . . Yet this is what we learn, beyond any possibility of doubt, from the Milky Way and the other galaxies.

You will all have gazed in curiosity at the Milky Way, that long whitish ribbon which, extending from east to west over the two hemispheres, girdles our firmament. Astronomers have long felt that this mysterious, luminous train must constitute one of the most important structural features of the Universe. They sought, therefore, to decipher it, and they have succeeded in doing so. This is the conclusion, dumbfounding but certain, at which they have arrived. The Milky Way, they tell us, is not at all, as one might suppose, a sort of cloud of diffused matter drifting like a mist among the stars. Instead, it denotes the boundary, it marks the equatorial contour, of a prodigious lenticular accumulation of cosmic matter nursing, in its spiral arms, the solar system, all our constellations, all our visible stars, and further millions besides (perhaps 100,000 x 10⁶ altogether); these latter being so remote from us that they convey no more than a vague, milky impression to our eyes. It has been possible to calculate the dimensions of this extraordinary celestial formation and the speed with which it rotates upon itself. According to Jeans its diameter is about 200,000 light-years and it takes 3 million years to complete a single revolution, at a peripheral speed of several hundred miles per second. Compared with this stupendous disc, Jeans remarks, the earth’s orbit is no bigger than a pin’s head compared with the surface of the American continent.

But the Milky Way, our Milky Way, is not the only one of its kind in the Universe. Here and there small milky patches are to be discerned in the sky, which the telescope shows to be spiral clouds containing sparks of brilliance. These, as we now know, are infinitely further away from us than the stars. They do not belong to our own, immediate world -- or, as one might put it, to the sidereal vessel which bears us. They are other islands, other fragments of the Universe, other Milky Ways sailing in convoy with our own through space (or even diverging from it at fantastic speeds). Several millions of these galaxies have already been counted (each, we must remember, composed of millions upon millions of stars), separated from one another by an average distance of 2 million light-years, and all of approximately the same size! A gas of galaxies on top of a gas of stars. . . . This is the truly overwhelming spectacle, far beyond our power to picture it, in which our present vision of the Universe culminates when we look in the direction of the Immense.

But must we not assume, following the logic of this principle of recurrence, that even beyond this there are super-galaxies, each formed of a group of spiral nebulae? We cannot be sure, but it seems improbable. The Universe is not composed, as Pascal thought, of pieces enclosed one in another, repeating themselves indefinitely and identically from bottom to top, from the infinitesimal to the immense. At a certain level the cosmic structure stops dead, and we pass on to ‘something else’. Beyond the galaxies there is nothing, according to Einsteinian physics, unless it be the spherical frame of Space- Time within which all things move in a circle, without ever coming to an end or being able to leave it. . . . Let us put aside this still unresolved problem of the upper limits of the world, and since we do not yet know what may be beyond or around the galaxies, let us at least consider what unites them -- that is to say, try to describe the genesis of their swarm. It is along this path, as you will see, that we shall eventually encounter the planets in search of which we started out.

At the very beginning, so the astronomers tell us -- that is to say, billions of years ago -- there was in place of the present world a diffused atmosphere, billions of times less dense than air, spreading in all directions over billions of miles. This ‘primordial chaos’, as Jeans calls it, must have seemed homogeneous; but inasmuch as it was subject to the force of gravity it was excessively unstable. A slight unevenness of distribution occurring by chance at any given point (a contingency that was bound to arise) was all that was needed to cause the entire edifice to break up into parts which, sundering themselves from their neighbors, coiled in more and more tightly upon themselves in enormous clots -- their vastness, by the law of celestial mechanics, being directly proportionate to the lightness of the matter of which they were originally composed. This was the first stage of the birth of the galaxies. The same disruptive process then operated within the separate galaxies, engendering smaller clots, since cosmic matter had become heavier. Thus the stars appeared.

Are we then to suppose that a third stage occurred in which the stars, in their turn, gave birth to planets through the condensation of their substance? This was the famous theory of Laplace; but a more thorough analysis of the problem has shown that it could not have happened in this way. Astronomers are today agreed that the distribution and movement of the heavenly bodies composing the solar system can only be explained by the hypothesis of a purely fortuitous occurrence -- for example, the near contact of two stars. This is to say that Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or little Pluto, the furthest of all, would not exist had not another Sun, by an extraordinary chance, passed so near to our Sun as almost to touch it (within three diameters!) wresting from it, by force of attraction, a long, cigar-shaped filament which in the course of time broke up into a string of separate globes.

And this brings us to the heart of the problem we set out to solve, namely: What is the place, the significance and the importance of our planets in the Universe?’

Because of their very small dimensions (even Jupiter is a dwarf compared with the Sun), the extreme weakness of the energy they radiate, and the short time they have been in existence (the galaxies were billions of years old when the solar system was born); even more important, because of their mode of existence, the planets look not merely like poor relations but like strangers and intruders in the sidereal system. Created by chance, they have no place in the normal and orthodox evolution of astral matter; with the exasperating result that we know nothing for certain about the existence or frequency of occurrence of planets outside the solar system. In Laplace’s thesis almost every star should have its girdle of planets. In present-day theory perhaps one star in 100,000 (Jeans’s estimate: Eddington puts the figure at millions) possesses them. And if to this we add the fact that, in the case of any given planet, it calls for a further extremely rare accident to produce the conditions which would endow it with life, we can see what a fantastically small figure, quantitatively speaking, our Earth cuts in the Universe.

I said just now, in seeking to describe the magnitude of the human events which are overtaking us, that they were of ‘planetary’ importance. But is not ‘planetary’ almost synonymous with ‘infinitesimal’? Let me recall from memory the hard words of Jeans (he wrote more hopeful ones later, you will be relieved to learn): ‘What does life amount to? We have tumbled, as though through error, into a universe which by all the evidence was not intended for us. We cling to a fragment of a grain of sand until such time as the chill of death shall return us to primal matter. We strut for a tiny moment upon a tiny stage, well knowing that all our aspirations are doomed to ultimate failure and that everything we have achieved will perish with our race, leaving the Universe as though we had never existed. . . . The Universe is indifferent and even hostile to every kind of life.’

But let us boldly state it: this bleak vista is not only so discouraging as to make action impossible; it is so much at variance, physically, with the existence and exercise of our intelligence (which, after all, is the one force in the world capable of dominating the world) that it cannot be the last word of Science. Following the physicists and astronomers we have thus far been contemplating the Universe in terms of the Immense -- immensity of space, time, energy and number. But is it not possible that we have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope, or seeing things in the wrong light? Suppose, instead, we survey the same landscape -- without, of course, attempting in any way to alter its arrangement -- in its bio-chemical aspect, that of Complexity.

2. In terms of Complexity; or the Planets as vital centers of the Universe

We will define the ‘complexity’ of a thing, if you allow, as the quality the thing possesses of being composed --

a of a larger number of elements, which are

b more tightly organized among themselves.

In this sense an atom is more complex than an electron, a molecule more complex than an atom, and a living cell more complex than the highest chemical nuclei of which it is composed, the difference depending (on this I insist) not only on the number and diversity of the elements included in each case, but at least as much on the number and correlative variety of the links formed between these elements. It is not, therefore, a matter of simple multiplicity but of organized multiplicity; not simple complication but centrated complication.

This idea of complexity (more exactly, centro-complexity) is easily grasped. In a universe where science ends by analyzing everything and taking everything apart, it simply expresses a particular characteristic applicable to every kind of body, like its mass, volume or any other dimension. But what do we gain by using this characteristic, rather than another, for the purpose of classifying the objects around us?

I will cite two advantages, although it means somewhat anticipating the latter parts of this lecture.

First, in the multitude of things comprising the world, an examination of their degree of complexity enables us to distinguish and separate those which may be called ‘true natural units’, the ones that really matter, from the accidental pseudo-units, which are unimportant. The atom, the molecule, the cell and the living being are real units because they are both formed and centrated, whereas a drop of water, a heap of sand, the Earth, the Sun, the stars in general, whatever the multiplicity or elaborateness of their structure, seem to possess no organization, no ‘centricity’. However imposing their extent they are false units, aggregates arranged more or less in order of density.

Secondly, the coefficient of complexity further enables us to establish, among the natural units which it has helped us to ‘identify’ and isolate, a system of classification that is no less natural and universal. Let us try to depict this classification in schematic form, as it might be drawn on a blackboard.

At the very bottom of the board we have the 92 simple chemical elements (from hydrogen to uranium) formed by groups of atomic nuclei together with their electrons.

Above these come the molecules composed of groups of atoms. These molecules, in the case of the carbon compounds, may become enormous. In the albuminoids (or proteins) there may be thousands of associated atoms: the molecular weight of hemoglobin is 68,000.

Above these again come the mysterious viruses, strange bodies producing a variety of maladies in animals and plants, concerning which we do not yet know if they are monstrous chemical molecules or living infra-bacteria. Their molecular weight runs into millions.

Higher still we come to the lowest cells. I do not know if any attempt has yet been made to ascertain the atomic content of these (it must amount to billions) but they are undoubtedly groups of proteins.

And finally we reach the world of higher living forms, each composed of groups of cells. To take a very simple instance, that of the plant duckweed; its content is estimated to be 4 X 10²⁰ atoms.

For the present we will disregard an even higher category which may conceivably have its place at the head of the list -- that formed by the grouping, not merely of cells, but of metazoa synthetically associated in such a manner as to comprise, when taken together, a single, living super-organism. We shall come back to this.

This scheme of classification, based essentially on the intimate structure of objects, is undeniably natural in principle. But it can also be seen to possess a double and extreme significance.

It is significant, in the first place, because for the scientist it bridges the long-standing, troublesome and seemingly irreducible gap between biology and physics. The wide distinction which for philosophical reasons we have thought it necessary to draw between life and matter ceases to be valid as a law of recurrence comes to light, in the phenomenal field, for practical purposes linking these two orders of phenomena. Beyond the millionth atom everything happens as though the material corpuscles stirred and were vitalized; the Universe organizes itself in a single, grand progression, somewhat untidy no doubt, but on the whole clear in its orientation, ascending from the most rudimentary atom to the highest form of living things.

Secondly it is significant because, arranged according to our scale of complexity, the elements succeed one another in the historical order of their birth. The place in the scale occupied by each corpuscle situates the element chronologically in the genesis of the Universe, that is to say, in Time. It dates it.

Thus the rising scale conforms both to the ascending movement towards higher consciousness and to the unfolding of evolutionary time. Does not this suggest that, by using the degree of complexity as a guide, we may advance very much more surely than by following any other lead as we seek to penetrate to the truth of the world and to assess, in terms of absolute values, the relative importance, the place, of all things?

With this in mind let us look again at the vast sidereal units (galaxies and suns) and this time try to assess their importance not in terms of their immensity or even complexity (since, as I have said, nebulae and stars are no more than aggregates) but in terms of the complexity of the elements which compose them.

We now see a very different picture; a complete reversal of values and perspective.

Let us look first at what is largest, the galaxies. In their least condensed parts (that is to say, in what they still contain of the vestiges of primordial chaos), the matter composing them is extremely tenuous; probably hydrogen, the most primitive substance known to us in the field of distinguishable matter. One nucleus and one electron: the simplest combination imaginable.

Now come down a stage in the scale of the immensities and look at the stars. Here the chemism is more elaborate. Whether in the red giants, the medium yellows or the white dwarfs, we may surmise at the presence in the center of heavy and extremely unstable elements possessing a greater atomic weight than uranium (unless these are simply ‘ordinary matter’ reduced to a physical state of extraordinary compression). At the same time, in the lighter surface-zone enveloping these depths the spectroscope can discern the entire range of our simple elements. In the stars, therefore, if we compare them with the original galaxies, the degree of complexity rises rapidly; but, and this is of major importance, it cannot go beyond a certain stage; that is to say (if we except a number of simple groups perceptible in the incandescent atmosphere of certain stars) it cannot reach the level of the composite bodies, i.e., the large molecules. The fact is that even on the periphery of these prodigious centers of energy the temperature is far too great for any higher combination to possess stability. The stars are essentially laboratories in which Nature, starting with primordial hydrogen, manufactures atoms. For the operation to go beyond this point we have to imagine two astonishing things:

First, that by a sort of ‘skimming’ process a portion of the stellar substance separates from the rest, deriving entirely from the surface-zone of lighter atoms which are not constantly threatened with radio-active disintegration. The larger molecules can only be constructed of elements possessing almost unlimited stability.

Secondly, that this light and stable ‘cream’ of any given star, having escaped beyond the reach of the tempest of energy blazing at the heart of the parent-body, may yet remain sufficiently close to it to derive a moderate benefit from its radiations: for the large molecules need energy for their synthesis.

But are not these two providential occurrences (the selection of a suitable ‘dough’ and its treatment in a suitable ‘oven’) precisely what that mysterious body, our father-star, effected in a single operation when, passing close to our Sun, it detached from its surface and scattered over a wide distance the ribbon of matter that became the planets?

You will now see where my argument is tending, or more exactly, where the guide which we have elected to follow, the scale of complexity, is irresistibly leading us. Despite their vastness and splendor the stars cannot carry the evolution of matter much beyond the atomic series: it is only on the very humble planets, on them alone, that the mysterious ascent of the world into the sphere of high complexity has a chance to take place. However inconsiderable they may be in the history of sidereal bodies, however accidental their coming into existence, the planets are finally nothing less than the key-points of the Universe. It is through them that the axis of Life now passes; it is upon them that the energies of an Evolution principally concerned with the building of large molecules is now concentrated.

We may well be dismayed by the rarity and improbability of heavenly bodies such as our own. But does not everyday experience teach us that in every order of Nature, and at every level, nothing succeeds except at the cost of prodigious waste and fantastic hazards? A monstrously fragile conjunction of chances normally dictates the birth of the most precious and essential beings. We can only bow before this universal law whereby, so strangely to our minds, the play of large numbers is mingled and confounded with a final purpose. Without being overawed by the Improbable, let us now concentrate our attention on the planet we call Earth. Enveloped in the blue mist of oxygen which its life breathes, it floats at exactly the right distance from the sun to enable the higher chemisms to take place on its surface. We do well to look at it with emotion. Tiny and isolated though it is, it bears clinging to its flanks the destiny and future of the Universe.

II. Man on the Planet Earth: The Most Complex of Molecules

Having established, on the basis of complexity, the astral preeminence of the planets in the sidereal system, and particularly that of the Earth, our obvious next step is to seek to determine, in cosmic terms, the significance and value on Earth of what we very improperly call ‘the human species’.

If the essential function and dignity of the Earth consist in its being one of the rare laboratories where, in time and space, the synthesis of ever larger molecules is proceeding; and if, as our table of complexity shows, living organisms, far from originating in germs fallen upon Earth from the celestial spaces, are simply the highest composites to spring from planetary geochemism,(I need hardly point out that for the purpose of this lecture, which does not seek to go outside the field if scientific observation, only the succession and interdependence of phenomena are taken into account: that is to say, an experimental law of recurrence, not an ontological analysis of causes.) then the discovery of Man’s absolute place in the Universe becomes simply a matter of deciding what position we who constitute Mankind occupy in the evolving range of super-molecules.

Here, however, a difficulty arises.

Where relatively simple molecular units are concerned their order of complexity may be roughly expressed by the number of atoms they contain, their ‘corpuscular number’ as one might call it. But when this corpuscular number exceeds a million (from the virus on) and still more when we come to the higher forms of life (there are something like a hundred billion cells in an average mammal, and hundreds of millions of atoms to each cell!) it becomes impossible to estimate the number of atoms, which would be so vast as to be almost meaningless even if it could be calculated. At this level of organization, in fact, the actual number of atoms contained in complex units is of minor importance compared with the number and quality of the links established between the atoms.

How then are we to go about classifying the higher living units so that the position of Man in terms of complexity may be determined? What method shall we adopt?

We can do it very simply by introducing what is called a change of variable. The more complex a being is, so our Scale of Complexity tells us, the more is it centered upon itself and therefore the more aware does it become. In other words, the higher the degree of complexity in a living creature, the higher its consciousness; and vice versa. The two properties vary in parallel and simultaneously. If we depict them in diagrammatic form, they are equivalent and interchangeable. So it comes to this, that when we have reached the point where complexity can no longer be reckoned in numbers of atoms we can nevertheless continue to measure it (and accurately) by noting the increase of consciousness in the living creature -- in practical terms, the development of its nervous system. This is the solution of our problem.

Accordingly, if we use the factor of psychic growth (or, which comes to the same thing, progress of cerebralization) as a scale whereby we may measure the growth of complexity through the maze of invertebrates, anthropoids and vertebrates, the position and significance of the human type in nature at once becomes apparent. For of all the numberless types of living unit that have appeared in the course of the last 300 million years, Man, judged by his power of reflection (itself bound up with the ultra-complexity of a brain composed of many millions of cells) not only comes indisputably first, but occupies a place of his own at the head of all the other ‘very great complexes’ evolved on Earth. And this incidentally explains why he tends increasingly to break away from the rest of terrestrial life, to detach himself in such a manner as to form (we shall return to this) a separate planetary envelope.

What does this mean except that, having been led by the idea of complexity to consider the Earth one of the vital points of the Universe, we find ourselves compelled, following the same principle, to recognize in Man the most advanced, and therefore the most valuable, of all the planetary elements? If it is the Earth which bears the fortunes of the world, then it is Man, in his extreme centro-complexity, who bears the fortunes of the Earth.

But if that is our situation, what is our destiny?

III. The Present State of Mankind: The Phase of Planetization

To open any book treating scientifically, philosophically or sociologically of the future of the Earth (whether by a Bergson or a Jeans) is to be struck at once by a presumption common to most of their authors, certain biologists excepted. Explicitly or by inference they talk as though Man today had reached a final and supreme state of humanity beyond which he cannot advance; or, in the language of this lecture, that, Matter having attained in Homo sapiens its maximum of centro-complexity on Earth, the process of super-molecularization on the planet has for good and all come to a stop.

Nothing could be more depressing, but also, fortunately, more arbitrary and even scientifically false, than this doctrine of immobility. No proof exists that Man has come to the end of his potentialities, that he has reached his highest point. On the contrary, everything suggests that at the present time we are entering a peculiarly critical phase of super-humanization. This is what I hope to persuade you of by drawing your attention to an altogether extraordinary and highly suggestive condition of the world around us, one which we all see and are subject to, but without paying any attention to it, or at least without understanding it: I mean the increasingly rapid growth in the human world of the forces of collectivization.

The phenomenon calls for no detailed description. It takes the form of the all-encompassing ascent of the masses; the constant tightening of economic bonds; the spread of financial and intellectual associations; the totalization of political regimes; the closer physical contact of individuals as well as of nations; the increasing impossibility of being or acting or thinking alone -- m short, the rise, in every form, of the Other around us. We are all constantly aware of these tentacles of a social condition that is rapidly evolving to the point of becoming monstrous. You feel them as I do, and probably you also resent them. If I were to ask your views you would doubtless reply that, menaced by this unleashing of blind forces, there is nothing we can do but evade them to the best of our ability, or else submit, since we are the victims of a sort of natural catastrophe against which we are powerless and in which there is no meaning to be discerned.

But is it true that there is nothing to understand? Let us look more closely, once again by the light of our principle of complexity.

The first thing to give us pause, as we survey the progress of human collectivization, is what I would call the inexorable nature of a phenomenon which arises directly and automatically out of the conjunction of two factors, both of a structural kind: first, the confined surface of the globe, and secondly, the incessant multiplication, within this restricted space, of human units endowed by ever-improving means of communication with a rapidly increasing scope for action; to which may be added the fact that their advanced psychic development makes them preeminently capable of influencing and inter-penetrating one another. Under the combined effect of these two natural pressures a sort of mass-hold of Mankind upon itself comes of necessity into operation.

But, the second noteworthy point, this phenomenon of holding, or cementing, turns out to be no sudden or unpredictable event. Looking at the picture as a whole we see that Life, from its lowest level, has never been able to effect its syntheses except through the progressively closer association of its elements, whether in the oceans or on land. Upon an imaginary earth of constantly increasing extent, living organisms, being only loosely associated, might well remain at the mono-cellular stage (if indeed they got so far); and certainly Man, if free to live in a scattered state, would never have reached even the neolithic stage of social development. The totalization in progress in the modern world is in fact nothing but the natural climax and paroxysm of a process of grouping which is fundamental to the elaboration of organized matter. Matter does not vitalize or super-vitalize itself except by compression.

I do not think it is possible to reflect upon this twofold in -- rooting, both structural and evolutionary, which characterizes the social events affecting us, without being at first led to the surmise, and finally overwhelmed by the evidence, that the collectivization of the human race, at present accelerated, is nothing other than a higher form adopted by the process of moleculatization on the surface of our planet. The first phase was the formation of proteins up to the stage of the cell. In the second phase individual cellular complexes were formed, up to and including Man. We are now at the beginning of a third phase, the formation of an organico-social super-complex, which, as may easily be demonstrated, can only occur in the case of reflective, personalized elements. First the vitalization of matter, associated with the grouping of molecules; then the hominization of Life, associated with a super-grouping of cells; and finally the planetization of Mankind, associated with a closed grouping of people: Mankind, born on this planet and spread over its entire surface, coming gradually to form around its earthly matrix a single, major organic unity, enclosed upon itself; a single, hyper-complex, hyper-centrated, hyperconscious arch-molecule, co-extensive with the heavenly body on which it was born. Is not this what is happening at the present time -- the closing of this spherical, thinking circuit?

This idea of the planetary totalization of human consciousness (with its unavoidable corollary, that wherever there are life-bearing planets in the Universe, they too will become encompassed, like the Earth, with some form of planetized spirit) may at first sight seem fantastic: but does it not exactly correspond to the facts, and does it not logically extend the cosmic curve of molecularization? It may seem absurd, but in its very fantasy does it not heighten our vision of Life to the level of other and universally accepted fantasies, those of atomic physics and astronomy? However mad it may seem, the fact remains that great modern biologists, such as Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane, are beginning to talk of Mankind, and to predict its future, as though they were dealing (all things being equal) with a brain of brains.

So why not?

Clearly this is a matter in which I cannot compel your assent. But I can assure you, of my own experience, that the acceptance of this organic and realistic view of the social phenomenon is both eminently satisfying to our reason and fortifying to our will.

Satisfying to the intelligence above all. For if it be true that at this moment Mankind is embarking upon what I have called its ‘phase of planetization’, then everything is clarified, everything in our field of vision acquires a new sharpness of outline.

The tightening network of economic and psychic bonds in which we live and from which we suffer, the growing compulsion to act, to produce, to think collectively which so disquiets us -- what do they become, seen in this way, except the first portents of the super-organism which, woven of the threads of individual men, is preparing (theory and fact are at one on this point) not to mechanize and submerge us, but to raise us, by way of increasing complexity, to a higher awareness of our own personality?

The increasing degree, intangible, and too little noted, in which present-day thought and activity are influenced by the passion for discovery; the progressive replacement of the workshop by the laboratory, of production by research, of the desire for well-being by the desire for more-being -- what do these things betoken if not the growth in our souls of a great impulse towards super-evolution?

The profound cleavage in every kind of social group (families, countries, professions, creeds) which during the past century has become manifest in the form of two increasingly distinct and irreconcilable human types, those who believe in progress and those who do not -- what does this portend except the separation and birth of a new stratum in the biosphere?

Finally, the present war; a war which for the first time in history is as widespread as the earth itself; a conflict in which human masses as great as continents clash together; a catastrophe in which we seem to be swept off our feet as individuals -- what aspect can it wear to our awakened eyes except that of a crisis of birth, almost disproportionately small in relation to the vastness of what it is destined to bring forth?

Enlightenment, therefore, for our intelligence. And, let it be added, sustenance and necessary reassurance for our power of will. Through the centuries life has become an increasingly heavy burden for Man the Species, just as it does for Man the Individual as the years pass. The modern world, with its prodigious growth of complexity, weighs incomparably more heavily upon the shoulders of our generation than did the ancient world upon the shoulders of our forebears. Have you never felt that this added load needs to be compensated for by an added passion, a new sense of purpose? To my mind, this is what is ‘providentially’ arising to sustain our courage -- the hope, the belief that some immense fulfillment lies ahead of us.

If Mankind were destined to achieve its apotheosis, if Evolution were to reach its highest point, in our small, separate lives, then indeed the enormous travail of terrestrial organization into which we are born would be no more than a tragic irrelevance. We should all be dupes. We should do better in that case to stop, to call a halt, destroy the machines, close the laboratories, and seek whatever way of escape we can find in pure pleasure or pure nirvana.

But if on the contrary Man sees a new door opening above him, a new stage for his development; if each of us can believe that he is working so that the Universe may be raised, in him and through him, to a higher level -- then a new spring of energy will well forth in the heart of Earth’s workers. The whole great human organism, overcoming a momentary hesitation, will draw its breath and press on with strength renewed.

Indeed, the idea, the hope of the planetization of life is very much more than a mere matter of biological speculation. It is more of a necessity for our age than the discovery, which we so ardently pursue, of new sources of energy. It is this idea which can and must bring us the spiritual fire without which all material fires, so laboriously lighted, will presently die down on the surface of the thinking earth: the fire inspiring us with the joy of action and the love of life.

All this, you may say to me, sounds splendid: but is there not another side to the picture? You tell us that this new phase of human evolution will bring about an extension and deepening of terrestrial consciousness. But do not the facts contradict your argument? What is actually happening in the world today? Can we really detect any heightening of human consciousness even in the most highly collectivized nations? Does it not appear, on the contrary, that social totalization leads directly to spiritual retrogression and greater materialism?

My answer is that I do not think we are yet in a position to judge recent totalitarian experiments fairly: that is to say, to decide whether, all things considered, they have produced a greater degree of enslavement or a higher level of spiritual energy. It is too early to say. But I believe this can be said, that in so far as these first attempts may seem to be tending dangerously towards the sub-human state of the ant-hill or the termitary, it is not the principle of totalization that is at fault but the clumsy and incomplete way in which it has been applied.

We have to take into account what is required by the law of complexity if Mankind is to achieve spiritual growth through collectivization. The first essential is that the human units involved in the process shall draw closer together, not merely under the pressure of external forces, or solely by the performance of material acts, but directly, center to center, through internal attraction. Not through coercion, or enslavement to a common task, but through unanimity in a common spirit. The construction of molecules ensues through atomic affinity. Similarly, on a higher level, it is through sympathy, and this alone, that the human elements in a personalized universe may hope to rise to the level of a higher synthesis.

It is a matter of common experience that within restricted groups (the pair, the team) unity, far from diminishing the individual, enhances, enriches and liberates him in terms of himself. True union, the union of heart and spirit, does not enslave, nor does it neutralize the individuals which it brings together. It super-personalizes them. Let us try to picture the phenomenon on a terrestrial scale. Imagine men awakening at last, under the influence of the ever-tightening planetary embrace, to a sense of universal solidarity based on their profound community, evolutionary in its nature and purpose. The nightmares of brutalization and mechanization which are conjured up to terrify us and prevent our advance are at once dispelled. It is not harshness or hatred but a new kind of love, not yet experienced by man, which we must learn to look for as it is borne to us on the rising tide of planetization.

Reflecting, even briefly, on the state of affairs which might evoke this universal love in the human heart, a love so often vainly dreamed of, but which now leaves the fields of Utopia to reveal itself as both possible and necessary, we are brought to the following conclusion: that for men upon earth, all the earth, to learn to love one another, it is not enough that they should know themselves to be members of one and the same thing; in ‘planetizing’ themselves they must acquire the consciousness, without losing themselves, of becoming one and the same person. For (and this is writ large in the Gospel) there is no total love that does not proceed from, and exist within, that which is personal.

And what does this mean except, finally, that the planetization of Mankind, if it is to come properly into effect, presupposes, in addition to the enclosing Earth, and to the organization and condensation of human thought, yet another factor? I mean the rise on our inward horizon of a cosmic spiritual center, a supreme pole of consciousness, upon which all the separate consciousnesses of the world may converge and within which they may love one another: the rise of a God.

It is here that reason may discern, conforming to and in harmony with the law of complexity,(Which here culminates, we may note, in a sort of proof of the existence of God: ‘proof by complexity’) an acceptable way of envisaging ‘the end of the world’.

Iv. The End of Planetary Life: Maturity and Withdrawal

The end of the world -- for us, that is to say, the end of Earth. . . . Have you ever thought seriously, in human terms, about that somber and certain eventuality?

Life at the beginning seemed modest in its requirements. A few hours in the sun were all it seemed to ask. But this was only a semblance, belied at the earliest stages of vitalization by the tenacity with which the most humble cells reproduce themselves and multiply. This tenacity continues through all the enormous effusion of the animal kingdom, and bursts into the light of day with the appearance, in thinking Man, of the formidable power of pre-vision. It cannot but grow still more imperious with every forward stride of human consciousness. I have spoken of the impulse to act, without which there can be no action. But in practice it is not enough, if the impulse is to be sustained in face of the ever-growing onslaughts of the taedium vitae, for it to be offered nothing more than an immediate objective, even though this be as great as the planetization of Mankind. We must strive for ever more greatness; but we cannot do so if we are faced by the prospect of an eventual decline, a disaster at the end. With the germ of consciousness hatched upon its surface, the Earth, our perishable earth that contemplates the final, absolute zero, has brought into the Universe a demand, henceforth irrepressible, not only that all things shall not die, but that what is best in the world, that which has become most complex, most highly centrated, shall be saved. It is through human consciousness, genetically linked to a heavenly body whose days are ultimately numbered, that Evolution proclaims its challenge: either it must be irreversible, or it need not go on at all! Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind. But what will presently be left of Mankind?

Thus every attempt to situate Man and the Earth in the framework of the Universe comes inevitably upon the heavy problem of death, not of the individual but on the planetary scale -- a death which, if we seriously contemplate it, must paralyze all the vital forces of the Earth.

In an attempt to dispel this shadow Jeans calculated that the Earth has many millions of years of habitability ahead of it, so that Man is still only on the threshold of his existence. He bade us warm our hearts, in this fresh dawn, with the almost limitless prospects of the glorious day that is only beginning. But a few pages previously he had talked of Mankind sadly growing old and disillusioned on a chilling globe, faced by inevitable extinction. Does not that first thought destroy the second?

Others seek to reassure us with the notion of an escape through space. We may perhaps move to Venus -- perhaps even further afield. But apart from the fact that Venus is probably not habitable (is there water?) and that, if journeying between celestial bodies were practicable, it is hard to see why we ourselves have not already been invaded, this does no more than postpone the end.

We cannot resolve this contradiction, between the congenital mortality of the planets and the demand for irreversibility developed by planetized life on their surface, by covering it up or deferring it: we have finally to banish the specter of Death from our horizon.

And this we are enabled to do by the idea (a corollary, as we have seen, of the mechanism of planetization) that ahead of, or rather in the heart of, a universe prolonged along its axis of complexity, there exists a divine center of convergence. That nothing may be prejudged, and in order to stress its synthesizing and personalizing function, let us call it the point Omega. Let us suppose that from this universal center, this Omega point, there constantly emanate radiations hitherto only perceptible to those persons whom we call ‘mystics’. Let us further imagine that, as the sensibility or response to mysticism of the human race increases with planetization, the awareness of Omega becomes so widespread as to warm the earth psychically while physically J it is growing cold. Is it not conceivable that Mankind, at the end of its totalization, its folding-in upon itself, may reach a critical level of maturity where, leaving Earth and stars to lapse slowly back into the dwindling mass of primordial energy, it will detach itself from this planet and join the one true, irreversible essence of things, the Omega point? A phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death: but in reality a simple metamorphosis and arrival at the supreme synthesis. An escape from the planet, not in space or outwardly, but spiritually and inwardly, such as the hyper-centration of cosmic matter upon itself allows.

This hypothesis of a final maturing and ecstasy of Mankind, the logical conclusion of the theory of complexity, may seem even more far-fetched than the idea (of which it is the extension) of the planetization of Life. Yet it holds its ground and grows stronger upon reflection. It is in harmony with the growing importance which leading thinkers of all denominations are beginning to attach to the phenomenon of mysticism. In any event, of all the theories which we may evolve concerning the end of the Earth, it is the only one which affords a coherent prospect wherein, in the remote future, the deepest and most powerful currents of human consciousness may converge and culminate: intelligence and action, learning and religion.

Lecture delivered at the French Embassy in Peking, 10th March, 1945. Ètudes, May 1946.

Introduction

During recent years I have sought in a long series of essays,( not to philosophize in the Absolute, but as a naturalist or physicist to discover a general significance in the events in which we are materially involved. A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral and religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it?

What I wish to offer here is the outcome of my own thinking, expressed in a simple and clarified form so that everyone may be able to understand it without ambiguity, and may criticise and (this is my great hope) correct and amplify it.

The present state of the world seems to me to be substantially determined and explained by the influence of two progressive changes affecting human consciousness at the deepest level.

The first change, already far advanced, is taking place in the field of our vision of the world. It amounts to the acquirement by the human mind of a new faculty, the perception of Time; or more precisely the perception of what I would call ‘the conic curvature of Time.(Le Milieu Divin, The Spirit of Earth, What I Believe, Human Energy, The Personal Universe, The Phenomenon of Man, etc.)

The second change, related to the first but less advanced, directly affects our Action. It arises Out of the gradual adjustment of human values in terms of this reappraisal of Time.

1. The Cone of Time.

2. The ‘conic’ transposition of Action.

I deal with these in separate Sections.

I. THE CONE OF TIME

1. The Organic Depth of Time and of the Spirit

To understand the spiritual events which are so convulsing the age we live in we need to be constantly looking back (I shall repeat this) to their common origin -- the discovery of Time.

At first sight the concept of Time appears so complete in its simplicity that one wonders how it can possibly be modified or improved upon. Is it not one of the solid facts on which our consciousness is based? Yet we have only to glance over the past two centuries to see that within these few generations our temporal view of the world has come to differ greatly from that of our ancestors.

This does not mean that men had to wait till the nineteenth century before seeing how events, grouped in long series, were absorbed into the past. They talked of Time long before our day, and even measured it, so far as their instruments permitted. as we do now. But Time remained for them a homogeneous quantity, capable of being divided into parts. The course of centuries lying ahead and behind us could be conceived of in theory as abruptly stopping or beginning at a given moment, the real and total duration of the Universe being supposed not to exceed a few thousand years. On the other hand, it appeared that within those few millennia any object could be arbitrarily displaced and removed to another point without undergoing any change in its environment or in itself. Socrates could have been born in the place of Descartes, and vice versa. Temporally (no less than spatially) human beings were regarded as interchangeable.

This, broadly, is what was accepted by the greatest minds up to and including Pascal.

But since then, under the influence, unconcerted but convergent, of the natural, historical and physical sciences, an entirely new concept has almost imperceptibly shaped itself in our minds.

We have in the first place realized that every constituent element of the world (whether a being or a phenomenon) has of necessity emerged from that which preceded it -- so much so that it is as physically impossible for us to conceive of a thing in Time without ‘something before it’ as it would be to imagine the same thing in Space without ‘something beside it’. In this sense every particle of reality, instead of constituting an approximate point in itself, extends from the previous fragment to the next in an indivisible thread running back into infinity.

Secondly we have found that the threads or chains of elements thus formed are not homogeneous over their extent, but that each represents a naturally ordered series in which the links can no more be exchanged than can the successive states of infancy, adolescence, maturity and senility in our own lives.

Finally, we have gradually come to understand that no elemental thread in the Universe is wholly independent in its growth of its neighboring threads. Each forms part of a sheaf; and the sheaf in turn represents a higher order of thread in a still larger sheaf -- and so on indefinitely. So that, Time acting on Space and incorporating it within itself, the two together constitute a single progression in which Space represents a momentary section of the flow which is endowed with depth and coherence by Time.

This is the organic whole of which today we find ourselves to be a part, without being able to escape from it. On the one hand, following an inter-linked system of lines of indefinite length, the Stuff of the Universe spreads and radiates outwardly from ourselves, without limit, spatially from the Immense to the Infinitesimal and temporally from the abyss of the past to the abyss of the future. On the other hand, in this endless and indivisible network, everything has a particular position defined by the development (free or pre-determined) of the entire system in movement. Whereas for the last two centuries our study of science, history and philosophy has appeared to be a matter of speculation, imagination and hypothesis, we can now see that in fact, in countless subtle ways, the concept of Evolution has been weaving its web around us. We believed that we did not change; but now, like newborn infants whose eyes are opening to the light, we are becoming aware of a world in which neo-Time, organizing and conferring a dynamic upon Space, is endowing the totality of our knowledge and beliefs with a new structure and a new direction.

Before studying the implications of this, we must look more closely at the nature and properties of the new environment into which we are being born.

2. The Convergence of Organic Time and the Upward Growth of the Spirit

Within the limits I have outlined, our new awareness of Time may now be regarded as an accomplished fact. Excepting a few ultra-conservative groups, it would not occur to any present-day thinker or scientist -- it would be psychologically inadmissible and impossible -- to pursue a line of thought which ignores the concept of a world in evolution.

But if the Space-Time continuum is now generally accepted as the only framework within which our thought can continue to progress, it becomes the more necessary that we should agree upon the nature and general direction of the flow on which we are borne. Is it a closed vortex, an indefinite spiral, a spreading explosion? . . . What is it that has us in its grip? Moreover, immersed in its movement as we are, do we possess any point of perspective from which we may see in what direction the cosmic stream is bearing us?

The majority of people personally known to me still regard the direction and purpose of Evolution as a riddle that is scientifically unanswerable.

But it is here, in my view, that the importance becomes manifest of an intuitive notion which, timidly evolved less than fifty years ago by a small group of human minds, is now beginning to pervade twentieth century thought as rapidly as did the idea of evolution in the nineteenth century. The discovery of the great phenomena buried in the past opened our fathers’ eyes to the vague, generalised perception of a process of evolution of Life on earth. To gain a clearer idea of the precise nature of this vast biological movement, is it not enough for us simply to open our eyes (are we not already beginning to do so?) to the extraordinary and present greatness of the phenomenon of Man?

I believe this to be the case, and I wish to show why.

It seemed, following the revolutionary ideas of first Galileo and then Lamarck and Darwin, that for the ‘lord of creation’ little was left of his past grandeur. The demolishing of the geocentric theory, leading two centuries later to the end of anthropocentrism, left Man to think of himself as finally submerged and flattened by the ‘temporal’ flow which his intelligence had discovered. But now he seems to be again emerging in the forefront of Nature. Evolution, so they said at the end of the last century, has simply swallowed Man up, since we have proved that it does not go beyond Man. But observing the progress of science during recent years we can see that what is happening suggests precisely the opposite. Far from being swallowed up by Evolution, Man is now engaged in transforming our earlier idea of Evolution in terms of himself and thereafter plotting its new outline.

Let me explain.

The three characteristics which make the human individual a truly unique object in the eyes of Science, once we have made up our minds to regard Man not merely as a chance arrival but as an integral element of the physical world, are as follows:

a an extreme physico-chemical complexity (particularly apparent in the brain) which permits us to consider him the most highly synthesized form of matter known to us in the Universe;

b arising out of this, an extreme degree of organisation which makes him the most perfectly and deeply centered of all cosmic particles within the field of our experience;

c finally, and correlative with the above, the high degree of psychic development (reflection, thought) which places him head and shoulders above all other conscious beings known to us.

To these may be added a fourth particularity which is also of great significance: that of being the latest product of Evolution.

It is difficult to consider these four attributes, relating them to Space-Time, without becoming aware of a prospect which, however we may seek to describe it, comes essentially to this:

Science has lately been very much preoccupied with the changing properties of Matter as we follow it in either of the two spatial directions -- towards the Infinitesimal or towards the Immense. Yet progress in either direction does not bring us a step nearer to the explanation of Life. Why should we not make room in our physics for the organic axis of Time? Following this axis in the downward direction of entropy we find that matter becomes diffused and energy is neutralized. This is something that we have long known. But why should we not take into specific account the cosmic movement operating in the reverse sense, towards the higher forms of synthesis, which is so strikingly apparent? Beneath our eyes, extending from the electron to Man by way of the proteins, viruses, bacteria, protozoa and metazoa, a long chain of composites is forming and unfolding, eventually attaining an astronomical degree of complexity and arrangement, and centered pari passu upon itself while at the same time it animates itself. Why should we not simply define Life as the specific property of Matter, the Stuff of the Universe, carried by evolution into the zone of highest complexity? And why not define Time itself as precisely the rise of the Universe into those high latitudes where complexity, concentration, centration and consciousness grow and increase, simultaneously and correlatively?

A cosmogenesis embracing and expanding the laws of our individual ontogenesis on a universal scale, in the form of Noogenesms: a world that is being born instead of a world that is: that is what the phenomenon of Man suggests, indeed compels us to accept, if we are to find a place for Man in this process of evolution in which we are obliged to make room for him.

We still hesitate, as I have said, over the form which we may conveniently attribute to Space-Time. But the fact is that we have no more time for quibbling. If it is to be adjusted to Man, the high point and effective spearhead of evolution; if it is to contain and propagate the Noogenesis through which the march of events expresses itself with an increasing clarity, Space-Time must be given whatever form is most appropriate. Caught within its curve the layers of Matter (considered as separate elements no less than as a whole) tighten and converge in Thought, by synthesis. Therefore it is as a cone, in the form of a cone, that it can best be depicted.

And it is within this cone, newly shaped in our consciousness, in terms of it and in accordance with its requirements, that we must look to see how the transposition of all human values is irresistibly proceeding.

II. THE ‘CONIC’ TRANSPOSITION OF ACTION

1. Towards a New Humanism

To accept that Space-Time is convergent in its nature is equally to admit that Thought on earth has not achieved the ultimate point of its evolution.

Indeed, if in virtue of its especial curvature the Universe, following the line of its principal axis, is really moving towards a state of maximal synthesis; and if furthermore, as practical observation shows, its human particles, taken as a whole, still possess a formidable potential of synthesis: then our present situation cannot be anything but ‘energetically’ instable. We cannot stay where we are at present, either physically or psychically; but looking far ahead we may descry an ultimate state in which, organically associated with one another (more closely than the cells of a single brain) we shall form m our entirety a single system, ultra-complex and, in consequence, ultra-centrated. . . . We thought that we had reached the limit of ourselves. Now we see Mankind extending within the cone of Time beyond the individual; it coils in collectively upon itself above our heads, in the direction of some sort of higher Mankind.

Let us enumerate and assess the changes of outlook and attitude that are inescapable for any person who has become aware of this prospect. I maintain that for such as he the Universe emerges from the shadows. It shows its true face, acquires its true value, glows with a new warmth and finally is illumined from within.

Let us look rapidly, one by one, at these phases of the transformation.

a Firstly, the Universe emerges from the shadows. That is to say, it clarifies itself to the eye of reason, and precisely in those regions where it threatened to plunge most deeply into darkness. On the one hand the overwhelming vastness of the Cosmos need no longer appall us, since the indefinite layers of Time and Space, far from being the lifeless desert in which we seemed to be lost, show themselves to be the bosom which gathers together the separate fragments of a huge Consciousness in process of growth. On the other hand Evil, in all its forms -- injustice, inequality, suffering, death itself -- ceases theoretically to be outrageous from the moment when, Evolution becoming a Genesis, the immense travail of the world displays itself as the inevitable reverse side -- or better, the condition -- or better still, the price -- of an immense triumph. And in its turn Earth, that microscopic planet on which we are crushed together, is seen to be no longer the meaningless prison in which we thought we must suffocate: for if its limits were less narrow and impenetrable could it be the matrix in which our unity is being forged ?

b Secondly, the Universe shows its true face: that is to say, it traces its outline for our liberated gaze. In its present state Morality offers a painful spectacle of confusion. Apart from a few elementary laws of individual justice, empirically established and blindly followed, who can say what is good and what is evil? Can we even maintain that Good and Evil exist while the evolutionary course on which we are embarked has no clear direction? Is striving really a better thing than enjoyment, disinterest better than self -- interest, kindness better than compulsion? Lacking a look-out point in the Universe, the most sharply opposed doctrines on these vital matters can be plausibly defended. Meanwhile human energy, being without orientation, is lamentably dissipated upon earth. But this disorder comes logically to an end, all the agitation is polarized, directly the spiritual reality of Mankind is revealed, above and ahead of each human being, at the apex of the Cone of Time. The best way of reaching this objective has still to be found. But is it not in itself a consolation and a source of strength to know that Life has an objective; and that the objective is a summit; and that this summit, towards which all our striving must be directed, can only be attained by our drawing together, all of us, more and more closely and in every sense -- individually, socially, nationally and racially?

c Thirdly, the Universe acquires its true value: that is to say, it grows, even to the least of its elements, limitlessly in our esteem. For the man who sees nothing at the end of the world, nothing higher than himself, daily life can only be filled with pettiness and boredom. So much fruitless effort, so many wasted moments! But to those who see the synthesis of the Spirit continuing on earth beyond their own brief existence, every act and event is charged with interest and promise. Indeed, it does not matter what we do each day, or what we undergo, provided we keep a steady hand on the tiller -- for are we not steering towards the fulfillment of the World? In the New Time there is no longer any distinction between those things that we classified on other levels as physical or moral, natural or artificial, organic or collective, biological or juridical. All things are seen to be supremely physical, supremely natural, supremely organic and supremely vital -- according to how far they contribute to the construction and closing of the time-space cone above us.

d Fourthly, the world glows with a new warmth: that is to say, it opens itself wholly to the power of Love. To love is to discover and complete one’s self in someone other than oneself; an act impossible of general realisation on earth so long as each man can see in his neighbor no more than a closed fragment following its own course through the world. It is precisely this state of isolation that will end if we begin to discover in each other not merely the elements of one and the same thing, but of a single Spirit in search of itself. Then the medium will be established in which a basic affinity may be born and grow, springing from one seed of thought to the next, canalizing in a single direction the swarm of individual trajectories. In the old Time and Space a universal attraction of souls was inconceivable. The existence of such a power becomes possible, even inevitable, in the curvature of a world capable of noogenesis.

e Fifthly, and lastly, the Universe is illumined from within: that is to say, it shows itself to be capable of fulfilling the highest of our mystical aspirations. By virtue of the convergence of the cosmic lines, as I have said, we must surmise the existence of a higher centre of consciousness ahead of us, at the apogee of Evolution. But if we seek to determine the position and analyze the properties of this Supreme Centre it soon becomes clear that we must look far beyond and far above any mere aggregation of perfected Mankind. If it is to be capable of joining together in itself the prolonged fibers of the world, the apex of the cone within which we move can be conceived only as something that is ultra-conscious, ultra-personalized, ultra-present. It must reach and act upon us, not only indirectly, through the universal network of physical synthesis, but also, and even more, directly, from center to center (that is to say, from consciousness to consciousness) by touching the most sensitive point in ourselves.

Thus it is that our humanity, renewed in its love of living and spurred on in its aspirations by the discovery that there is a peak to the arrow-course of Time, comes logically to perfect itself in an attitude of self-abandonment and adoration.

2. Towards a Christian Renewal

As recently as yesterday Christianity represented the highest point attained by the consciousness of Mankind in its striving to humanize itself. But does it still hold this position, or at the best can it continue to hold it for long? Many people think not; and to account for this slackening impulse in the highest and most complete of human mystical beliefs they argue that the evangelical flowering is ill-adapted to the critical and materialist climate of the modern world. They hold that the time of Christianity is past, and that some other shoot must grow in the field of religion to take its place.

But if; as I maintain, the event that characterizes our epoch is a growing awareness of the convergent nature of Space-Time, then nothing can be more ill-founded than this pessimism. Transferred within the cone of Time, and there transmuted, the Christian system is neither disorganized nor deformed. On the contrary, sustained by the new environment, it more than ever develops its main lines, acquiring an added coherence and clarity.

This is what, in conclusion, I wish to show.

What is finally the most revolutionary and fruitful aspect of our present age is the relationship it has brought to light between Matter and Spirit: spirit being no longer independent of matter, or in opposition to it,(Provided of course, that we do not understand ‘matter’ in a ‘reduplicative’ and restricted sense to mean that portion of the Universe which ‘redescends’, escaping the rising stream of the Noogenesis.) but laboriously emerging from it under the attraction of God by way of synthesis and centration.

But what is the effect, for Christian faith and mysticism, of this redefinition of the Spirit? It is simply to confer absolute reality and absolute urgency upon the double dogma on which the whole of Christianity rests, and by which it is summed up: the physical primacy of Christ and the moral primacy of Charity.

Let us see.

a The Primacy of Christ. In the narrow, partitioned and static Cosmos wherein our fathers believed themselves to dwell, Christ was ‘lived’ and loved by His followers, as He is today, as the Being on whom all things depend and in whom the Universe finds its ‘substance’. But this Christological function was not easily defended on rational grounds, at least if the attempt was made to interpret it in a full, organic sense. Accordingly Christian thinking did not especially seek to incorporate it in any precise cosmic order. At that time the Royalty of Christ could be readily expressed in terms of His ascendancy through moral law; or else it was sufficient that He should prevail in the non-experimental, extra-cosmic sphere of the supernatural. Theology, in short, did not seem to realise that every kind of Universe might not be compatible with the idea of an Incarnation. But with the concept of Space-Time, as we have defined it, there comes into effect a harmonious and fruitful conjunction between the two spheres of rational experience and of faith. In a Universe of ‘Conical’ structure Christ has a place (the apex!) ready for Him to fill, whence His Spirit can radiate through all the centuries and all beings; and because of the genetic links running through all the levels of Time and Space between the elements of a convergent world, the Christ-influence, far from being restricted to the mysterious zones of ‘grace’, spreads and penetrates throughout the entire mass of Nature in movement. In such a world Christ cannot sanctify the Spirit without (as the Greek Fathers intuitively perceived) uplifting and saving the totality of Matter. Christ becomes truly universal to the full extent of Christian needs, and in conformity with the deepest aspirations of our age the Cross becomes the Symbol, the Way, the very Act of progress.

b The Primacy of Charity. What the modern mind finds disconcerting in Christian charity is its negative or at least static aspect, and also the ‘detached’ quality of this great virtue. ‘Love one another . . .’ Hitherto the evangelical precept has seemed simply to mean, ‘Do not harm one another’, or, ‘Seek with all possible care and devotion to diminish injustice, heal wounds and soften enmities in the world around you.’ Hitherto, also, the ‘supernatural’ gift of ourselves which we were required to make to God and to our neighbor appeared to be something opposed to and destructive of the bonds of feeling attaching us to the things of this world.

But if Charity is transplanted into the cone of Time nothing remains of these apparent limitations and restrictions. Within a Universe of convergent structure the only possible way in which an element can draw closer to its neighboring elements is by tightening the cone -- that is to say, by causing the whole layer of the world of which it is a part to move towards the apex. In such an order of things no man can love his neighbor without drawing nearer to God -- and, of course, reciprocally (but this we knew already). But it is also impossible (this is newer to us) to love either God or our neighbor without assisting the progress, in its physical entirety, of the terrestrial synthesis of the spirit: it is precisely the progress of this synthesis which enables us to draw closer together among ourselves, while at the same time it raises us towards God. Because we love, and in order that we may love even more, we find ourselves happily and especially compelled to participate in all the endeavours, all the anxieties, all the aspirations and also all the affections of the earth -- in so far as these embody a principle of ascension and synthesis.

Christian detachment subsists wholly in this wider attitude of mind; but instead of ‘leaving behind’ it leads on; instead of cutting off, it raises. It is no longer a break-away but a way through; no longer a withdrawal but an act of emerging. Without ceasing to be itself; Charity spreads like an ascending force, like a common essence at the heart of all forms of human activity, whose diversity is finally synthesized in the rich totality of a single operation. Like Christ Himself; and in His image, it is universalized, it acquires a dynamic and is humanized by the fact of doing so.

To sum up, in order to match the new curve of Time Christianity is led to discover the values of this world below the level of God, while Humanism finds room for a God above the level of this world. Inverse and complementary movements: or rather, the two faces of a single event which perhaps marks the beginning of a new era for Mankind.

This double transformation is something more than a speculation of my own. Throughout the world at this moment, without distinction of country, class, calling or creed, men are appearing who have begun to reason, to act and to pray in terms of the limitless and organic dimensions of Space-Time. To the outside observer such men may still seem isolated. But they are aware of one another among themselves, they recognize each other whenever their paths cross. They know that tomorrow, rejecting old concepts, divisions and forms, the world will see what they see and think as they do.

Peking, 13 February 1942. Psyché, November 1946.

Part I. The Future of Man Seen by a Palaeontologist

Introduction

When, little more than a century ago, Man first discovered the abyss of time that lies behind him, and therefore the abyss that lies ahead, his first feeling was a tremendous hope, a sense of wonderment at the progress our fathers had made.

But now the wind seems to have changed. Following many setbacks a wave of troubled skepticism (adorned with the name of ‘realism’) is sweeping through the world. Whether from immobilist reaction, sick pessimism or simply pose, it has become ‘good form’ to deride or mistrust anything that looks like faith in the future.

‘Have we ever moved? Are we still moving? And if so, are we going forward or back or simply in a circle?’

This is an attitude of doubt that will prove fatal if we do not take care, because in destroying the love of life it also destroys the life-force of Mankind.

I wish to show in this paper that, however bitter our disillusionment with human goodness in recent years, there are stronger scientific reasons than ever before for believing that we do really progress and that we can advance much further still, provided we are clear about the direction in which progress lies and are resolved to take the right road.

I. Preliminary Observation: the Slow Movements

To understand what follows we must first thoroughly assimilate the idea that there are movements in the Universe so slow that we cannot directly detect them. The idea of slow movement is in itself very simple and commonplace -- we have all looked at the hour-hand of a watch. But it took us a long time to realise that the more stable and immobile a given object in Nature may appear to be, the greater is the likelihood that it represents a profound and majestic process of movement. We know now that the vast system of stars in our own sky is composed of a single nebula, the Milky Way, in course of granulation and deployment; and that this nebula, in association with millions of other spiral units, forms a single, immense super-system which is also in process of expansion and organisation. We know that the continents tremble and that the mountains continue to rise beneath our feet . . . and so on.

It can be said that Science today progresses only by peeling away, one after another, all the coverings of apparent stability in the world; disclosing beneath the immobility of the infinitely small, movement of extra rapidity, and beneath the immobility of the Immense, movement of extra slowness.

We are concerned here with the second of these effects, which may be expressed as follows: everything in the Universe moves; but the larger a thing is, the slower is its movement.

2. The Case of Life

This being posited let us leave the nebulae and the mountains and turn to Life itself, of which Mankind is a fragment.

Life, by our time-scale, is a phenomenon of prodigious age -- over 300 million years. Moreover it is composed of myriads of separate elements and it covers the earth. In terms of space-time Life comes m the category of immensely large things. It is part of the Immense, and if it moves at all it moves like the Immense.

Our object is to determine whether Life and Mankind move. We can only find out by observing them (like the hour-hand of our watch) over a great length of time. Here it is that we see the part played by paleontology, as well as the secret vice of our critics.

3. The Role of Paleontology

It might seem that paleontology is a science of pure speculation or inquisitiveness, and the paleontologist the most unreal and useless of researchers; a man dedicated to retrospection, plunged living into the past, where he spends his days collecting the debris of dead things. That is certainly what many laymen think, and it may well be the view humbly taken by many paleontologists of themselves.

But in this the instinct that prompts our work sees more clearly than reason. The reconstruction of ‘that which was’ may rationally appear to be merely a fantasy for idle minds; but in fact the meticulous work accomplished in the past hundred years by the collectors of fossils, the results which they have patiently recorded in innumerable papers and in barbarous language, perfectly incomprehensible to non-initiates, the paraphernalia of systematized knowledge and the clutter on the museum shelves, all this has made a contribution of the utmost importance to the world’s thinking. It has added to the sum of human knowledge an item of extraordinary interest -- a segment of the past extending over three hundred million years.

Do we fully realize its value?

We are trying, let me repeat, for vital reasons to determine whether the world, Mankind, is the seat of any kind of progress. Let us put aside all metaphysical speculation, all sentimental impressions and arguments. We are dealing with a question of fact and we must look at the facts. If we confine ourselves to short periods of time on which progress makes no mark our argument will drag on and get nowhere. But if we contemplate a depth of time such as this one that we have been able to reconstruct in the laboratory, any movement of Life, if such exists, must of necessity show itself.

Instead of arguing fruitlessly within the over-brief space of a few generations, let us look at the broad vista which science offers us. What do we see?

4. The Growth of Consciousness

For various psychological and technical reasons which I need not examine here, the reading or decipherment of the tract of time disclosed by paleontology is still not free of difficulty. Indeed it continues to be a matter of vehement dispute. The interpretation which I am about to put forward must therefore not be regarded as ‘accepted’. Nevertheless it seems to me so self-evident that I have no hesitation in offering it as the correct interpretation and the one destined sooner or later to win general scientific agreement.

It may be stated thus: when observed through a sufficient depth of time (millions of years) Life can be seen to move. Not only does it move but it advances in a definite direction. And not only does it advance, but in observing its progress we can discern the process or practical mechanism whereby it does so.

These are three propositions which may be briefly developed as follows.

a Life moves. This calls for no demonstration. Everyone in these days knows how greatly living forms have changed if we compare two moments m the earth’s history sufficiently separated in time. In any period of ten million years Life practically grows a new skin.

b In a definite direction. This is the crucial point which has to be clearly understood. While accepting the undeniable fact of the general evolution of Life in the course of time, many biologists still maintain that these changes take place without following any defined course, in any direction and at random. This contention, disastrous to any idea of progress, is refuted, in my view, by the tremendous fact of the continuing ‘cerebralization’ of living creatures. Research shows that from the lowest to the highest level of the organic world there is a persistent and clearly defined thrust of animal forms towards species with more sensitive and elaborate nervous systems. A growing ‘innervation’ and ‘cephalization’ of organisms: the working of this law is visible in every living group known to us, the smallest no less than the largest. We can follow it in insects as in vertebrates; and among the vertebrates we can follow it from class to class, from order to order, and from family to family. There is an amphibian phase of the brain, a reptile phase, a mammal phase. In mammals we see the brain grow as time passes and become more complex among the ungulates, the carnivores and above all the primates. So much so that one could draw a steadily rising Curve of Life taking Time as one co-ordinate and, as the other, the quantity (and quality) of nervous tissue existing on earth at each geological stage.

What else can this mean except that, as shown by the development of nervous systems, there is a continual heightening, a rising tide of consciousness which visibly manifests itself on our planet in the course of the ages?

c We come to the third point. What is the underlying process whose existence we can perceive in this continual heightening of consciousness, as revealed by the organic evolution of the nervous system and the brain? Let us look more closely in the light of the latest data supplied by the combined ingenuity of an army of research workers. As we are beginning to realize, there are probably tens of thousands of atoms grouped in a single virus molecule. There are certainly tens of thousands of molecules grouped in a single cell. There are millions of brains in a single ant-hill. . . .

What does this atomism signify except that Cosmic Matter, governed at its lower end (as we already know) by forces of dispersal which slowly cause it to dissolve into atoms, now shows itself to be subjected, at the other end, to an extraordinary power of enforced coalescence, of which the outcome is the emergence, pan passu, of an ever-increasing amount of spiritual energy in matter that is ever more powerfully synthesized? Let me note that there is nothing metaphysical in this. I am not seeking to define either Spirit or Matter. I am simply saying, without leaving the physical field, that the greatest discovery made in this century is probably the realisation that the passage of Time may best be measured by the gradual gathering of Matter in superposed groups, of which the arrangement, ever richer and more centralized, radiates outwards from an ever more luminous fringe of liberty and interiority. The phenomenon of growing consciousness on earth, in short, is directly due to the increasingly advanced organisation of more and more complicated elements, successively created by the working of chemistry and of Life. At the present time I can see no more satisfactory solution of the enigma presented to us by the physical progress of the Universe.

5. The place of Man in the forefront of Life

In what I have said thus far I have been looking at Life in general, in its entirety. We come now to the particular case which interests us most -- the problem of Man.

The existence of an ascendant movement in the Universe has been revealed to us by the study of paleontology. Where is Man to be situated in this line of progress?

The answer is clear. If, as I maintain, the movement of the cosmos towards the highest degree of consciousness is not an optical illusion, but represents the essence of biological evolution, then, in the curve traced by Life, Man is unquestionably situated at the topmost point; and it is he, by his emergence and existence, who finally proves the reality and defines the trajectory -- ‘the dot on the i’. . . .

Indeed, within the field accessible to our experience, does not the birth of Thought stand out as a critical point through which all the striving of previous ages passes and is consummated -- the critical point traversed by consciousness, when, by force of concentration, it ends by reflecting upon itself?

Prior to Galileo science thought of Man as the mathematical and moral centre of a World composed of spheres turning statically upon themselves. But in terms of our modern neoanthropocentricity, Man, both diminished and enlarged, becomes the head (terrestrial) of a Universe that is in the process of psychic transformation -- Man, the last-formed, most complex and most conscious of ‘molecules’. From which it follows that, borne on the tide of millions of years of psychogenesis, we have the right to consider ourselves the fruit of a progression -- the children of progress.

The world did at least progress to the point where the first-born of our race appeared. Here we have a fixed and solid point on which to base our philosophy of life.

Let us now take a further step.

We may agree that zoological evolution culminated in Man. But having reached this peak did it come to a stop? Life continued to move until Thought entered the world, this we may admit. But has it advanced since then? Can it make any further progress?

6. The Movement of Mankind upon Itself

Ancient though prehistory may make it seem to our eyes, Mankind is still very young. We can trace its existence for not much more than a hundred thousand years, a period so short that it has left no mark on the majority of the animal forms that preceded us on the earth and which still surround us. It may seem impossible, and it is certainly a very delicate matter, to measure any movement of Life in so slender a fragment of the past. Nevertheless, owing to the exceptionally rapid development which is a characteristic of the human wave, a direct assessment of the advance of our own group in terms of consciousness is possible to the practiced eye, even within this limited tract of time.

a It seems in the first place that, anatomically, a gradual evolution of the brain can be discerned during the earliest phases of our phylogenesis. Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus possessed intelligence, but there are solid grounds for supposing that they were not cerebrally as well developed as ourselves.

b We may accept that the human brain reached the limit of its development at the stage which anthropologists call Homo sapiens; or at least, if it has continued to develop since then, that the change cannot be detected by our present methods of observation. But although, since the Age of the Reindeer (that is to say, within a period of twenty or thirty thousand years) no progress is perceptible in either the physical or the mental faculties of Individual Man, the fact of organo-psychic development seems to be clearly manifest in Collective Man: and this, whatever we may think of it, represents as true an advance as the acquisition of an added convolution by the brain.

Let me here repeat the two fundamental equations or equivalents which we have established:

Progress = growth of consciousness.

Growth of Consciousness = effect of organization.

Taken together these mean that, in order to discover or verify the existence of biological progress within a given system, we have only to observe, for the period of time and the field we are considering, how far the state of organization varies within that system.

This being posited we may compare the world of the cave-dweller with the world of today. Setting all theory aside there can be no question but that, within this period of 30,000 years, Mankind has advanced almost unbelievably in its state of concentration.

Economic concentration, manifest in the unification of the earth’s energies.

Intellectual concentration, manifest in the unification of our knowledge in a coherent system (science).

Social concentration, manifest in the unification of the human mass as a thinking whole.

To those who have not studied its implications, this slow and irresistible flow of our history in the direction of more and more unified groupments has no particular meaning; they relegate it to the trivial category of surface and incidental phenomena, no more. But to the enlightened eye this human development, succeeding all the twists and turns of pre-human consciousness, assumes a dazzling significance. For the two curves are a prolongation one of the other. Tremendous events such as those through which we are now passing are seen to take shape, and with a brilliant clarity. This tremendous war which so afflicts us, this remolding, this universal longing for a new order, what are they but the shock, the tremor and the crisis, beyond which we may glimpse a more synthetic organisation of the human world? And this new order, the thought of which is in all our minds, what form can it take other than a higher degree of self-awareness on the part of a Mankind become at once more complex and more centered upon itself?

No, truly: Life in emerging into Thought did not come to a stop. Not only has it moved and progressed from the protozoa to Man, but since the coming of Man it has continued to advance along its most essential path. We can feel it at this moment quivering beneath our feet! The ship that bears us is still making headway.

And it is here that the ultimate and decisive question arises, finally the only question that interests us. Thus far Life, and Man himself, has progressed. So be it. But what of the future? We are still moving, but can we continue much longer to advance?

Have we not reached a dead-end? Can we talk seriously of a future for Mankind?

7. The Future of Mankind

I make no claim to be a prophet. Moreover I know, as a scientist, how dangerous it is to extend a curve beyond the facts, that is to say, to extrapolate. Nevertheless I believe that, basing the argument upon our general knowledge of the world’s history over a period of 300 million years, we can advance the following two propositions without losing ourselves in a fog of speculation:

a Firstly, Mankind still shows itself to possess a reserve, a formidable potential of concentration, i.e. of progress. We have only to think of the immensity of the forces, ideas and human beings that have still to be born or discovered or applied or synthesized. . . . ‘Energetically’ as well as biologically the human group is still young, still fresh. If we are to judge by what history teaches us about other living groups, it still has, organically speaking, some millions of years in which to live and develop.

b Everything leads us to believe that it really does dispose of this vast reservoir of time, which is necessary for the normal achievement of its evolution. The earth is far from having completed its sidereal evolution. We may envisage all kinds of mischance (disaster or disease) which might in theory put an end to our evolutionary progress: but the fact remains that for 300 million years Life has paradoxically flourished in the Improbable. Does not this suggest that its advance may be sustained by some Sort of complicity on the part of the ‘blind’ forces of the Universe -- that is to say, that it is inexorable?

The more we ponder these matters the more must we realize that, scientifically speaking, the real difficulty presented by Man is not the problem of whether he is a center of constant progress: it is far more the question of how long this progress can continue, at the speed at which it is going, without Life blowing up upon itself or causing the earth on which it was horn to explode. Our modern world was created in less than 10,000 years, and in the past 200 years it has changed more than in all the preceding millennia. Have we ever thought of what our planet may be like, psychologically, in a million years’ time? It is finally the Utopians, not the ‘realists’, who make scientific sense. They at least, though their flights of fancy may cause us to smile, have a feeling for the true dimensions of the phenomenon of Man.

8. The Advance

Having clarified our ideas, let us see what action they require of us. If progress is to continue, it will not do so of its own accord. Evolution, by the very mechanism of its syntheses, charges itself with an ever-growing measure of freedom.

If indeed an almost limitless field of action lies open to us in the future, what shall our moral dispositions be, as we con- template this march ahead?

I can think of two, which may be summarized in six words: a great hope held in common.

a First, the hope. This must spring to life spontaneously in every generous spirit faced by the task that awaits us; and it is also the essential impulse, without which nothing can be done. A passionate longing to grow, to be, is what we need. There can be no place for the poor in spirit, the skeptics, the pessimists, the sad of heart, the weary and the immobilists. Life is ceaseless discovery. Life is movement.

b A hope held in common. Here again the history of Life is decisive. Not all directions are good for our advance: one alone leads upward, that which through increasing organization leads to greater synthesis and unity. Here we part company with the whole-hearted individualists, the egoists who seek to grow by excluding or diminishing their fellows, individually, nationally or racially. Life moves towards unification. Our hope can only be realized if it finds its expression in greater cohesion and greater human solidarity.

This double point is finally established by the verdict of the Past.

9. The Crossroads

But here there is a grave uncertainty to be resolved. The future, I have said, depends on the courage and resourcefulness which men display in overcoming the forces of isolationism, even of repulsion, which seem to drive them apart rather than draw them together. How is the drawing together to be accomplished? How shall we so contrive matters that the human mass merges in a single whole, instead of ceaselessly scattering in dust?

A priori, there seem to be two methods, two possible roads.

a The first is a process of tightening-up in response to external pressures. We are in any case inescapably subject to this through the negative action of terrestrial causes. The human mass, because on the confined surface of this planet it is in a state of continuous additive growth, in numbers and interconnections, must automatically become more and more tightly concentrated upon itself. To this formidable process of natural compression there may well be added the artificial constraint imposed by a stronger human group upon a weaker; we have only to look about us at the present time to see how this idea is seeking, indeed rushing towards, its realization.

b But there is another way. This is that, prompted by some favoring influence, the elements of Mankind should succeed in making effective a profound force of mutual attraction, deeper and more powerful than the surface-repulsion which causes them to diverge. Forced upon one another by the dimensions and mechanics of the earth, men will purposefully bring to life a common soul in this vast body.

Unification by external or by internal force? Compulsion or Unanimity?

I spoke earlier of the present war. Does it not precisely express the tension and interior dislocation of Mankind shaken to its roots as it stands at the crossroads, faced by the need to decide upon its future?

10. The Choice

Gloriously situated by life at this critical point in the evolution of Mankind, what ought we to do? We hold Earth’s future in our hands. What shall we decide?

In my view the road to be followed is clearly revealed by the teaching of all the past.

We can progress only by uniting: this, as we have seen, is the law of Life. But unification through coercion leads only to a superficial pseudo-unity. It may establish a mechanism, but it does not achieve any fundamental synthesis; and in consequence it engenders no growth of consciousness. It materializes, in short, instead of spiritualizing. Only unification through unanimity is biologically valid. This alone can work the miracle of causing heightened personality to emerge from the forces of collectivity. It alone represents a genuine extension of the psychogenesis that gave us birth.

Therefore it is inwardly that we must come together, and in entire freedom.

But this brings us to the last question of all. To create this unanimity we need the bond, as I said, the cement of a favoring influence. Where shall we look for it; how shall we conceive of this principle of togetherness, this soul of the Earth?

Is it to be in the development of a common vision, that is to say, the establishment of a universally accepted body of knowledge, in which all intelligence will join in knowing the same facts interpreted in the same way?

Or will it rather be in common action, in the determination of an Objective universally recognized as being so desirable that all activity will naturally converge towards it under the impulse of a common fear and a common ambition?

These two kinds of unanimity are undoubtedly real, and will, I believe, have their place in our future progress. But they need to be complemented by something else if they are not to remain precarious, insufficient and incomplete. A common body of knowledge brings together nothing but the geometrical point of intelligence. A common aspiration, no matter how ardent, can only touch individuals indirectly and in an impersonal way that is depersonalizing in itself.

It is not a tête-à-tête or a corps-à-corps that we need; it is a heart-to-heart.

This being so, the more I consider the fundamental question of the future of the earth, the more it appears to me that the generative principle of its unification is finally to be sought, not in the sole contemplation of a single Truth or in the sole desire for a single Thing, but in the common attraction exercised by a single Being. For on the one hand, if the synthesis of the Spirit is to be brought about in its entirety (and this is the only possible definition of progress) it can only be done, in the last resort, through the meeting, center to center, of human units, such as can only be realized in a universal, mutual love. And on the other hand there is but one possible way in which human elements, innumerably diverse by nature, can love one another: it is by knowing themselves all to be centered upon a single ‘super-center’ common to all, to which they can only attain, each at the extreme of himself, through their unity.

‘Love one another, recognizing in the heart of each of you the same God who is being born.’ Those words, first spoken two thousand years ago, now begin to reveal themselves as the essential structural law of what we call progress and evolution. They enter the scientific field of cosmic energy and its necessary laws.

Indeed, the more I strive, in love and wonder, to measure the huge movements of past Life in the light of paleontology, the more I am convinced that this majestic process, which nothing can arrest, can achieve its consummation only in becoming Christianized. (Unpublished. Peking, 22 February, 1941. Lecture delivered at the French Embassy, on the 3rd March of the same year.)

Part II. On the Possible Bases of a Universal Human Creed

The purpose of the New York meetings, if I understand it aright, is not merely to seek a superficial reconciliation between the diverse forms of Faith which divide the human spirit and make it at odds with itself, but to find what they have fundamentally in common. We seek a new spirit for a new order.

I beg to be allowed to offer a brief contribution and personal testimony, the fruit of thirty years spent in close and sincere contact with scientific and religious circles in Europe, America and the Far East.

1. The Precise Point of Divergence. . . God or the World?

It seems to me clear above all else, setting aside the countless minor divergences, and ignoring the dull, inert mass of those who believe in nothing at all, that the spiritual conflict afflicting Mankind today arises out of the division of minds and hearts into the two profoundly separated categories of:

a Those whose hopes are directed towards a spiritual state or an absolute finality situated beyond and outside this world;

b Those who hope for the perfection of the tangible Universe within itself.

The first of these groups, by far the older, is pre-eminently represented in these days by the Christians, protagonists of a transcendent and personal God.

The second group, comprising those who for a variety of reasons have dedicated their lives to the service of a Universe which they conceive as eventually culminating in some form of impersonal and immanent Reality, is of very recent origin. Throughout human history this conflict between the ‘servants of Heaven’ and the ‘servants of earth’ has gone on; but only since the birth of the idea of Evolution (in some sort divinising the Universe) have the devotees of earth bestirred themselves and made of their worship a true form of religion, charged with limitless hope, striving and renunciation.

Are we to disdain the world and put it behind us, or live in it in order to master and perfect it? Mankind is rent asunder at this moment by these two concepts or rival mysticisms; and in consequence its vital power of adoration is disastrously weakened.

Such in my view is the nature of the crisis, more profound than any economic, political or social struggle, through which we are passing.

2. A Principle of Convergence. The Concept of Noogenesis

Any two forces, provided both are positive, must a priori be capable of growth by merging together. Faith in God and faith in the World: these two springs of energy, each the source of a magnificent spiritual impulse, must certainly be capable of effectively uniting in such a way as to produce a resulting upward movement. But in practical terms where are we to look for the principle and the generative medium which will bring about this most desirable evolutionary step?

I believe that the principle and the medium are to be found in the idea, duly ‘realized’, that there is in progress, within us and around us, a continual heightening of consciousness in the Universe.

For a century and a half the science of physics, preoccupied with analytical researches, was dominated by the idea of the dissipation of energy and the disintegration of matter. Being now called upon by biology to consider the effects of synthesis, it is beginning to perceive that, parallel with the phenomenon of corpuscular disintegration, the Universe historically displays a second process as generalized and fundamental as the first: I mean that of the gradual concentration of its physico-chemical elements in nuclei of increasing complexity, each succeeding stage of material concentration and differentiation being accompanied by a more advanced form of spontaneity and spiritual energy.

The out-flowing flood of Entropy equaled and offset by the rising tide of a Noogenesis! . . .

The greater and more revolutionary an idea, the more does it encounter resistance at its inception. Despite the number and importance of the facts that it explains, the theory of Noogenesis is still far from having established itself as a stronghold in the scientific field. However, let us assume that, as all the observable evidence suggests, it will succeed before long in gaining in one form, or another the place it deserves at the head of the structural laws of our Universe. Plainly the first result will be precisely to bring about the rapprochement and automatic convergence of the two opposed forms of worship into which, as I said, the religious impulse of Mankind is at present divided.

Once he has been brought to accept the reality of a Noogenesis, the believer in this World will find himself compelled to allow increasing room, in his vision of the future, for the values of personalization and transcendency. Of Personalization, because a Universe in process of psychic concentration is identical with a Universe that is acquiring a personality. And of transcendency because the ultimate stage of ‘cosmic’ personalization, if it is to be supremely coherent and unifying, cannot be conceived otherwise than as emerging at the summit of the elements it super-personalizes in uniting them to itself.

On the other hand, the believer in Heaven, accepting this same reality of a cosmic genesis of the Spirit, must perceive that the mystical evolution of which he dreams presupposes and consecrates all the tangible realities and all the arduous conditions of human progress. If it is to be super-spiritualized in God, must not Mankind first be born and grow in conformity with the entire system of what we call ‘evolution’? Whence, for the Christian in particular, there follows a radical incorporation of terrestrial values in the most fundamental concepts of his Faith, those of Divine Omnipotence, withdrawal and charity. First, Divine Omnipotence: God creates and shapes us through the process of evolution: how can we suppose, or fear, that He will arbitrarily interfere with the very means whereby He fulfills His purpose? Then, withdrawal: God awaits us when the evolutionary process is complete: to rise above the World, therefore, does not mean to despise or reject it, but to pass through it and sublime it. Finally, charity: the love of God expresses and crowns the basic affinity which, from the beginnings of Time and Space, has drawn together and concentrated the spiritualizable elements of the Universe. To love God and our neighbor is therefore not merely an act of worship and compassion superimposed on our other individual preoccupations. For the Christian, if he be truly Christian, it is Life itself, Life in the integrity of its aspirations, its struggles and its conquests, that he must embrace in a spirit of togetherness and personalizing unification with all things.

The sense of the earth opening and exploding upwards into God; and the sense of God taking root and finding nourishment downwards into Earth. A personal, transcendent God and an evolving Universe no longer forming two hostile centers of attraction, but entering into hierarchic conjunction to raise the human mass on a single tide. Such is the sublime transformation which we may with justice foresee, and which in fact is beginning to have its effect upon a growing number of minds, freethinkers as well as believers: the idea of a spiritual evolution of the Universe. The very transformation we have been seeking!

3. A New Soul for a New World: Faith Renewed in the Progress of Mankind

From this standpoint it is at once apparent that, to unify the living forces of humanity, at present so painfully at odds, the direct and effective method is simply to sound the call-to-arms and form a solid block of all those, whether of the right or the left, who believe that the principal business of present-day Mankind is to achieve a breakthrough straight ahead by forcing its way over the threshold of some higher level of consciousness. Whether Christian or non-Christian, the people inspired by this particular conviction constitute a homogeneous category. Though they may be situated at the two extreme wings of Mankind on the march, they can advance unequivocally side by side because their attitudes, far from being mutually exclusive, are virtually an extension one of the other and ask only to be completed. What more do they need that they may know and love one another? The union sacrée, the Common Front of all those who believe that the World is still advancing: what is this but the active minority, the solid core around which the unanimity of tomorrow must harden?

Despite the wave of skepticism which seems to have swept away the hopes (too ingenuous, no doubt, and too materialistic) on which the nineteenth century lived, faith in the future is not dead in our hearts. Indeed, it is this faith, deepened and purified, which must save us. Not only does the idea of a possible raising of our consciousness to a state of super-consciousness show itself daily, in the light of scientific experience, to be better founded and psychologically more necessary for preserving in Man his will to act; but furthermore this idea, carried to its logical extreme, appears to be the only one capable of paving the way for the great event we look for -- the manifestation of a unified impulse of worship in which will be joined and mutually exalted both a passionate desire to conquer the World and a passionate longing to be united with God: the vital act, specifically new, corresponding to a new age in the history of Earth.

I am convinced that finally it is upon the idea of progress, and faith in progress, that Mankind, today so divided, must rely and can reshape itself.

Remarks on a New York Congress of Science and Religion. Unpublished. Peking, 30 March 1941.