The following pages do not seek to present any philosophy directly; they set out, on the contrary, to draw their strength from the careful avoidance of all recourse to metaphysics. Their purpose is to express as objective and simple a vision as possible of humanity considered (as a whole in its connections with the Universe) as a phenomenon.

What impression should we have of humanity if we were able to perceive it with the same eyes with which we look at the trilobites and the dinosaurs? And, inversely, how would the trilobites and the dinosaurs look to us zoologically if we could firmly place them, in our perspectives, in series with humanity? This is the question that is attempted in this study.

This question must be asked and answered. A host of scholars are occupied with human anatomy, physiology, psychology, and sociology. A number of others are examining the properties or history of life and infra-human substances. Now hardly any effort has yet really been made to harmonize these two domains. Though the human and non-human are intimately linked in nature, we persistently look on them from two completely different points of view; in practice if not in theory, researchers and thinkers almost always act as if even viewed by science (although it is only concerned with appearances and antecedents) man were a certain universe, and what is not man, another. More or less alone, anatomy and morphology have tried to bring about the connection, that is to say to look boldly on man as an element in their scientific constructions. But because they have operated in a single domain, or with restricted methods, they have disparaged the value of humanity and drained the phenomenon of man of its specific properties. Usually indeed they have only obscured our vision of man’s place in nature. The moment has come to resume a legitimate attempt on broader bases.

Since, as we all feel, it is wrong to preserve two different ways of seeing and valuing things, according as they fit inside or outside the zoological group in which we lie, we will try to look at man as pure natural scientists, adding nothing to him and, at the same time, taking nothing from him, but noting everything as we should in any living species discovered here or on another planet. We will then hand over the result of this ‘observation’ to be discussed by the professional metaphysicians.

The attempt that we suggest is not easy; if it is already difficult for the biologist and physicist to relate in their perspectives the world of beings seen ‘life size’ with the world of the infinitely small discovered by calculation or perceived by the microscope, it is a far greater labour for our minds to incorporate in a first world, seen entirely from outside (the world of minerals, plants, animals) a second world (the human world) seen almost entirely from within. Really we have to come out of our sphere and look at ourselves, at least for a moment, as if we did not know ourselves. Such a reversal, or if you prefer it, such a depersonalization, is so contrary to our habits that we expect to give an idea of the action rather than perform it. Of one thing we can be sure: that we shall be rewarded for merely attempting or outlining the action, by the powerful and dramatic interest that the human commonplaces will assume, rediscovered from this point of view.

Anyone turning back to man with eyes ‘dehumanized’ (with the vision, for example, that comes of a long journey through the deeper zones of matter and life) will be astounded to find that humanity, so uninteresting to our bored gaze, nevertheless represents in the world of experiment: a region endowed with extraordinary properties forming a new and independent zone of the universe, and yet produced, in some way, by the maturing of the entire Earth, by a process still half-conscious in which we can discover the spring and direction of the general evolution of life.

This is what we shall attempt to make at least to some extent clear.

The first characteristic of man, observed from the strictly zoological viewpoint which we have assumed, is somewhat disconcerting, and hardly seems to agree with the greatness of the perspectives we have announced. Somatically, considering the importance he has assumed in the terrestrial layer of life (or biosphere), man differs astonishingly little from the animal forms amidst which he emerged: he is very much a primate and, as such, preserves with exceptional lustre the zoological characteristics of the most ancient known mammals. Flattening of the face, increase of the cerebral part of the skull, two-footed stance coinciding with a general recasting of the body’s balance but leading to no profound transformation of the bones taken singly, this is all that osteology finds to report, to distinguish man from the anthropoids. Form of limbs, number of fingers, pattern of teeth, so curiously ‘primitive’ that they recall an age of the world in which none of the carnivores or ungulates that today people the continents were yet alive; these are the characteristics that surprise the paleontologist when he studies human morphology. Measured by the indices generally adopted to separate and arrange in series the other animal forms, man differs less from the apes than the bird from the reptiles, or the seal from the rest of the carnivores. He does not deserve to form zoologically more than a family or sub-order: the hominids or hominians.

This first peculiarity of man (that is to say his slight morphological differentiation, apparently disproportionate with his biological influence) is not at all a restrictive or negative characteristic, however much as it may seem so at first sight. On the contrary, associated with the other properties of the species, it acquires (as we shall soon see) a distinguishing and positive sense which makes it one of the most symptomatic indices of the transcendence of the phenomenon of man. We must, however, recognize that the absence of easily and absolutely distinctive features in the exterior physiognomy of our race easily inclined the classifiers to underestimate the scientific importance of our first appearance. In any case, it certainly helped to spread among natural scientists the impression that man is, for science, a composite, paradoxical being to whom one cannot safely extend the theories constructed for other animal families. Considered zoologically in his individual qualities, man is in danger of passing unperceived, and ill-recognized among the living creatures who surround him; or rather, on the contrary, he seems disconnected, sharing no common measure with them.

To grasp the greatness of the human zoological fact, we must not look superficially at its common appearances or detach it from its empirical frame, but carefully observe and consider humanity’s second property, in which the astonishing originality of our animal group begins to reveal itself more distinctly, though still in the realm of tangible things: I mean man’s truly unique power of extending and invading.

From a simple geographical point of view, the extension of the human race is extraordinary, so extraordinary that it requires all the destructive force exercised by habit on the brightness of our impressions to prevent us from appreciating the miraculous element in the spectacle of humanity’s ascent through life, the spectacle of the human tide covering the Earth. Let us forget the enormous masses of living matter (microbial, planktonic, or others) which form the more or less amorphous basis of the biosphere: a legitimate omission since in these lower zones, the minute size of the elements, their unorganized accumulation, their global passivity, and all sorts of analogies with the lifeless circles of the world are dominant factors. Let us then confine our observations and comparisons to the upper categories of living beings, that is to say to those in which the specific form of the organism predominates over the osmotic or capillary phenomena; and the spontaneous arrangement of pairs and individuals predominates over the almost vegetable movements of floating or pullulating. Let us, moreover, make the salutary mental effort which consists in momentarily departing from our present-day Earth to take a new look with the aid of geology and paleontology at the vanished face of times gone by. Then let us return to ourselves, and we shall be almost speechless at the sight of humanity’s zoological triumph.

At certain epochs, of course, we see the continents covered with different amphibians and reptiles. But these successive invasions, which rightfully rouse our admiration, are very different from the human invasion. Amphibians or reptiles, to speak of them alone, do not represent simple sheets of life. Under these somewhat factitious names, expressing a general type of life rather than a rigorously connected group, we assemble an immense variety of complex things, bringing together a very loose network of disconnected or hostile forms. Humanity, on the other hand (and here, as we said, is its prime characteristic in the eyes of natural scientists), forms a morphological whole of almost disconcerting simplicity and homogeneity. Osteologically speaking, very little distinguishes it from the other primates. Simple shades of distinction, often difficult to fix, separate, at the present day at least, the races that compose it. On the basis of this unity, composed in a manner of speaking of morphologically almost nothing (or rather despite this unity) men provide the zoologists with an example of a vital success beyond all comparison. If a paleontologist from another planet were to land on our Earth, presumed to be entirely fossilized, he would conclude from the simple inspection, recognition and classification of our bones, without even tracing the vestigial links and constructions with which we shall have to deal, that in the Quaternary the Earth experienced a biological phenomenon of which no equivalent exists at any other zoological epoch. With prodigious rapidity (considering the very slow rhythm of general events in life) man overran the Earth. Like a fire, whose very activity made him sometimes destructive, he assimilates or eliminates all life that is not of an order of size too different from his own. And if here and there other living groups appear to rival him in cosmopolitan capacities, very often he carries them with him, giving them the benefit of his strange power of dissemination and conquest. However one may view it, man is in course of transforming the rest of the animals or killing them with his shadow. Was it not Professor Osborn who lately asked with some anxiety: ‘Can we save the mammals?’

Never, at any epoch, has a superior being occupied the Earth as extensively as man. This is the brutal, tangible fact which should attract the attention of the greatest positivists and make them suspect a mystery. Let us conclude the analysis of this fact and ask ourselves now if there is not some means of characterizing by quality (although still from a strictly experimental point of view) this sheet of humanity, so remarkable for its quantity. I think there is. Two properties absolutely new in the history of life appear with man; and one cannot ignore them scientifically without rendering the fact of his expansion inexplicable in its process and misunderstanding its ends. These are: the discovery by individuals of the artificial tool, and the realization by the collectivity of an organically linked unity. Let us study these two aspects of the phenomenon of man more closely and in turn.

Before man and outside man, the tool is not absent; far from it. But except in exceptional, almost aberrant cases, strictly limited in every instance,1 it has the characteristic of being confused with the organism it uses. M. L. Cuénot is the first to my knowledge openly to have made this (very simple but profound) remark that all that we call zoological phyla represent only the transformation of a limb or a whole body into an instrument. The mole is a digging instrument and the horse a running instrument; the porpoise is a swimming instrument and the bird a flying instrument. In these various cases, there is an instrumental specialty by kind, by family, or by zoological order. Elsewhere, among the social insects for example, chosen individuals only are more or less totally transformed into instruments of war or reproduction. But in every case, the tool is one with the body, the living being passes into its invention.

With man everything changes. The instrument becomes external to the limb that uses it; and this entirely new method of action brings with it two consequences which entirely affect the history of life from humanity onwards: first, as is clear, a very great increase of power (in both variety and intensity), in which can be found one of the principal empirical factors in human success: secondly, and this is a more unexpected fact, a sharp fall in the apparent faculty of organisms to evolve.

This last proposition may seem a little strange. But on reflexion it will be seen that it is quite plausible, for this reason: if the somatic differentiations which preoccupy all zoologists are really bound up with the transformation of organs into instruments, man, being capable of manufacturing instruments without lending them his flesh, escapes the harsh need of transforming himself in order to act. He can therefore progress without changing his form, and vary indefinitely in his psychism without modifying his zoological type. Have we not here the partial solution of this paradox of a humanity whose ‘classifying’ characteristics have an insignificant value in relation to the importance of the group’s role in the biosphere? Humanity seems to us much more powerful biologically than it has any right to be systematically. But we are quite mistaken in the way we extend the rules of systematics to man. To appreciate man at his true zoological value, we should not separate ‘natural’ from ‘artificial’ as absolutely as we do in our perspectives, that is to say ignore the profound connexions between the ship, the submarine, the aeroplane and the animal reconstitutions which produced the wing and the fin. By this perspective, which we will shortly resume and extend, humanity should have at least the dimensions and value of a zoological order (as befits its enormous extension); only these adaptive ‘radiations’ remain for humanity in some manner exteriorized. The same individual may be a mole, a bird, or a fish alternately. Alone among the animals, man has the faculty of diversifying his efforts without becoming their out-and-out slave.

Thanks to its prodigious power as a tool-maker, humanity covers the continents with an almost continuous envelope of constructions; it modifies climates and the incidence of erosion; it links the seas; it distributes new substances in torrents among those in natural circulation; it alters the face of the Earth to an extent which should warn us that its appearance marks the beginnings of a new phase for our planet. But this great rehandling of materials, which may rival in its geological importance the traces left on the Earth’s crust by the most powerful lines that have appeared within living forms, is still absolutely nothing compared with another capital fact which is revealed to us by inspection of its human layer. Humanity does not only make its instrumental domination of the Earth serve to supplant all vital competition and build a world for itself; it uses it to establish a true organic unity founded in itself.

Such is, in fact, the distinctive and remarkable character of the envelope woven by humanity on the terrestrial globe that this envelope is not formed of elements coarsely juxtaposed or irregularly distributed, but tends to constitute a network informed by a common vitality.

The organic unity of humanity: Such is, in fact, the distinctive and remarkable character of the envelope woven by humanity on the terrestrial globe that this envelope is not formed of elements coarsely juxtaposed or irregularly distributed, but tends to constitute a network informed by a common vitality.

Clearly, this conscious cohesion that we claim as peculiar to the human group does not represent a totally new phenomenon in the world. Humanity is not outside life but extends the line of life. Now just as the so-called physico-chemical matter seems incomprehensible without some deeper unity found by the corpuscular plurality in a common reality that we call sometimes ether, sometimes space-time; just as drops of water lost within the vast sheets of oceans participate in all sorts of common chemical, thermal, or capillary relationships; so, at a higher degree of reality, no living mass (whether it is the whole biosphere or a fraction of it) is conceivable by science, except as permeated and animated by certain forces of solidarity which bring the particular forms into balance and control the unifying currents within the All. In the social insects especially, the collective forces acquire an extraordinary individuality and precision. Humanity recognizably presents a unity of this type for us, when taken as a whole. Indeed it presents, as we shall repeat later on, the same fundamental unity. But in such unparalleled amplitude and in such detailed and increased perfection!

Humanity, one may say, is an anthill. But how can one fail to see that it differs from an anthill by two characteristics which profoundly affect its nature? First, it is universal, extending over the whole Earth; and this totalitarian characteristic seems, as we shall see, to have a particular qualitative significance. Furthermore—and this is the point on which we should dwell—it is provided with special linking organs which not only assure rapid communication between the elements, but little by little transform their aggregate into a sort of organism which it would be wrong to consider as simply metaphorical.

In fact, it must be repeated, our view of life is obscured and inhibited by the absolute division that we continually place between the natural and the artificial. It is, as we stated, because we have assumed in principle that the artificial has nothing natural about it (that is to say because we have not seen that artifice is nature humanized), that we fail to recognize vital analogies as clear as that of the bird and the aeroplane, the fish and the submarine. It is owing to this same fatal assumption that we have for years watched the astonishing system of earth, sea, and air routes, postal channels, wires, cables, pulsations in the ether covering the face of the Earth more closely every day without understanding. ‘Merely communications for business or pleasure,’ they repeat, ‘the setting up of useful commercial channels.’ ‘Not at all,’ we say; ‘something much more profound than that: the creation of a true nervous system for humanity; the elaboration of a common consciousness, on a mass scale clearly in the psychological domain and without the suppression of individuals, for the whole of humanity.’ By developing roads, railways, aeroplanes, the press, the wireless, we think we are only amusing ourselves, or only developing our commerce, or only spreading ideas. In reality, as anyone can see who tries to put together the general design of human movements and of the movements of all physical organisms, we are quite simply continuing on a higher plane and by other means the uninterrupted work of biological evolution.

It would be worthwhile to discover and define by means of a special study, the various organs, apparently artificial but really natural and profound, by which the true life of the human layer establishes itself and develops. One would then see that institutions as ordinary as our libraries, that forces as external to our bodies as education, come far closer than might be supposed to constituting a memory and heredity for humanity. Let us leave these developments aside, for it is as easy to exaggerate the analogies as it is wrong to underestimate them and dangerous to deny them; and let us conclude our inventory of the known properties of humanity by remarking that they all emanate from two special psychic factors as observable scientifically as any other measurable energy: reflexion and (to use Édouard Le Roy’s expression) ‘conspiration.’ Reflexion, from which has arisen the discovery of the artificial instrument and, consequently, the invasion of the world by the human species: this is the faculty possessed by every human consciousness of turning in on itself in order to recognize the conditions and mechanism of its own activity. ‘Conspiration,’ from which is born the entirely new form of connection that distinguishes the human layer from all other departments of earthly life, is the aptitude of different consciousnesses, taken in a group, to unite (by language and countless other, more obscure links) to constitute a single All, in which, by way of reflexion, each element is conscious of its aggregation to all the rest.

Reflexion, ‘conspiration’: on discerning these two essentially human properties, we reach the final, but also the upper limit of what we can learn from the look that we proposed to take at man and life, as pure natural scientists. We have never left the ground of facts. Yet we have found the best means of sharpening our perception of all that is special and unique in the phenomenon of man. It is time therefore to start on the next phase of our inquiry. In our picture of the world, what zoological and systematic place should we give to this astounding biological production, humanity?

The systematic position of man in the zoological series has appeared to us a serious problem ever since we began to measure the flagrant disproportion which exists between the slight morphological variation which led to reflected thought and the enormous impact produced by the appearance of this new faculty on the general distribution of life on Earth.

We began to solve this problem when we noted that the morphological homogeneity of the human race, so remarkable when compared with the inner diversification undergone by the other animal sheets, was apparently due only to the invention of artificial tools. Humanity, as we said, like all living groups that have covered the Earth at a given moment, has its inner phyla, its formal radiations or verticils: but these phyla are hidden and scattered, being represented not by lines of beings differentiated according to their specialization, but by categories of instruments which may be used successively by the same individual. When we take this into account, the human species appears a little less paradoxical. Despite its slight morphological distance from the other primates, and despite its apparent poverty in differentiated lines, it has the size, the value, and the wealth not only of an ‘order,’ but of a still vaster natural group. Zoologically, it has in itself alone, the importance not only of the carnivores or the rodents, but as much as all the mammals together. Here is the first truth that appears. But because humanity has the value of an order or even a class, does that really make it an order or a class? This is something quite different.

Undoubtedly this new way of understanding the position and systematic value of man would be more objective, would pay more respect to the greatness of the human fact than that of including our group, as a sub-order or family, among the apes. But, on the other hand, it would have a great drawback: it would confuse the harmony of our zoological divisions without displaying the value and specific novelty of the human species. To raise humanity to the dignity of an order or class would be to imply that it enters without change of member or form into a system of classification expressly constructed for a vital zone in which every change of activity is expressed by a change of organ. Man not only forms an exception to this law; but does so by the play of those very psychical properties which are the source of his known biological importance.

Now we have completely discovered the gravity of the problem presented to the natural sciences by the existence of man. Let it be carefully noted that when we speak of increasing the systematic value of the human group, it is not a question of tendentiously magnifying it for the purpose of some spiritual thesis. It is simply a question of saving science. Is it possible to safeguard at the same time both the value of the somatic characteristics adopted by systematization in order to grade beings, and the phenomenon’s supreme originality (also its deep roots in the empirical world)? This is the fundamental question.

We can see only one method of escaping this difficulty; which is to state, by consideration of his unique categories, that man, connected though he is to the general development of life, represents an absolutely new phase at the termination of that development. This is to relate his appearance not only to the isolation of a class or even a predominance in the midst of life, but to something like the budding of life itself in the midst of matter. We begin to understand that the most natural division of the elements of the Earth would by by zones, by circles, by spheres; and that among these concentric unities, organized matter itself must find its place. More clearly than the rest, the geologist Suess defined the telluric value of the mysterious living envelope which was formed at the dawn of geological time around our stellar unity. Although this view may seem at first sight both exaggerated and fantastic, what we now propose is to regard the thinking envelope of the biosphere as of the same order of zoological (or if you like, telluric) magnitude as the biosphere itself. The more one considers it, the more this extreme solution seems the only honest one. Unless we give up all attempts to restore man to his place in the general history of Earth as a whole without damaging him or disorganizing it, we must place him above it, without, however, uprooting him from it. And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere a human sphere, the sphere of reflexion, of conscious invention, of the conscious unity of souls (the noösphere, if you will) and to conceiving, at the origin of this new entity, a phenomenon of special transformation affecting pre-existent life: hominization. Humanity cannot be less than this without losing what constitutes its most certain physical characteristics or (what would be equally deplorable) without becoming a reality impossible to place scientifically along the other terrestrial objects. Either humanity is a fact without precedent or measure; in which case it does not fit into our natural categories, and our science is valueless. Or it represents a new turn in the mounting spiral of things; and in this case we can see no other turn to correspond with it lower down except the very first organization of matter. Nothing can be compared with the coming of reflective consciousness except the appearance of consciousness itself.

We have now reached the culminating point of our present study. Many will refuse to follow us further and declare that what we are proposing is a dream. This will only be because they will not yet have opened their eyes to the strange singularity of the human event. But let us admit that we are really speaking of a dream; it is our pleasure to pursue this dream to the end, and to see how much better the vastness and depth of the world harmonize in our dream than in the narrow reality in which our antagonists would like to confine us. To place in our scientific representation of the terrestrial world a natural division of the first order immediately below the layer of humanity is first to explain without violence the principal properties of that layer; and then to flood with the light of probability the most inward movements of biological evolution.

Discontinuity does not mean a break. The whole perspective whose objectivity we are defending is bound up with a clear vision of this elementary truth, which is confirmed for us by countless analogies borrowed from the changes in the physical state of bodies and the development of geometrical figures.

Let us consider, for example, a cone, and in this cone let us follow the gradual diminution of its regular transverse sections in the course of a continuous movement from the base to the summit. Nothing is so different from a point as a surface. And yet, from the direction of movement chosen by us and from the properties of the cone, we discover that a given progression along the axis of the solid, having for a long time led only to a reduction in the surface areas found without modification in their nature, will at a given moment make a surface yield to a point. The cone will have produced its peak. A new order of realities is discovered and established by evolution.

Let us apply this figure to the question occupying us. What makes it difficult, we said, to understand humanity scientifically is the confusing mixture of very ancient and absolutely new characteristics that it entails. Brought up before this mixture, scholars hesitate and differ. Some, too exclusively zoological, engulf us in the lower mass of animals; they see only evolution. Others, naïvely spiritual, isolate us, making our group a sort of driftwood floating without roots on the great waters of the world; they are sensitive only to discontinuity. These are clearly two contrary exaggerations, due to an incomplete catalogue of the types of change and, consequently, of the number of zoological stages possible in the universe. In order to explain the apparent genesis of the world, they obstinately offer only two opposing terms: complete stability and continuous change. Let us decide, under pressure of the facts, to introduce into natural history the notion of single points or changes of state. We were considering a moment ago the common geometrical point formed by the slow concentration of a surface. Let us now try to look at humanity scientifically as born by an effort of total generation and, at the same time, by way of a critical point: that of the entire maturing of life, that is to say of the Earth itself. Let us consequently create a new compartment in our divisions of reality, to follow that of purely animal life and yet heterogeneous to it. Let us admit, in other words, that in the structure of the terrestrial world, there are not only classes, branches, kingdoms, but that one must see in it spheres also, of which we are the last to arrive. Immediately, as can easily be seen, the human antimony is reduced and our perspectives are no longer confused.

As we have already several times seen, if we cease to place an absolute barrier between what we call artificial and natural, the structure of the lower zoological groups appears as visibly continuing through the sheet of humanity. Not only in their forms, their gait, their individual instincts, but in the collective associations and ramifications of their activities, men constitute a faunistic and zoological whole. Here is the cone and its complicated system of generating lines extending into the punctiform and indissoluble complexity of the peak. But, nevertheless, closely though the artificial can be bound to the natural, it differs from it profoundly. The artificial is the ‘natural reflected,’ accompanied by that mysterious power of conscious cohesion between individuals which allows of their inclusion in a single layer, conscious of its connections. All the inferior manifestations of life, recognizable and unrecognizable at once, are renewed and reanimated in man. This is the unparalleled simplicity of the peak, which recasts in its rich unity the pluralism of the sheet which furls back into it.

For once geometry will have taught us a better understanding of life. Thanks to geometry we shall have put our fingers on all that is odiously absurd and fundamentally true in that phrase which drops from so many ignorant mouths and is hawked by so many pedantic textbooks: ‘Man descends from the apes.’ The phrase is true if one takes it to mean that, in the geological perspective, man appeared at the end of the same movement which planned and organized the lower zones of life. But it is absurd, if, as too often happens, it is taken to mean that man was born adventitiously in a narrow compartment of the biosphere and that his coming did not involve the liberation of any new terrestrial power.

Man, viewed zoologically, constitutes a new stage (perhaps a supreme stage) in the series of fundamental states through which life—and therefore terrestrial matter—is compelled to pass. As such, and despite the location of its insertion point in a determined part of the zoological tree, it represents a zone necessary for the general balance. This is the really scientific conception to which we are led by an honest inspection of all his empirical qualities. And this can, in addition, give us the best understanding of the mechanism by which life develops in general, even outside humanity also. Once the scientific reality and specific quality of the phenomenon that we have called hominization are admitted, not only does man cease to be a paradoxical excrescence in the world; but he becomes, as he normally should, the very key to our explanations of the universe. This is what now remains for us to show.

In science, even more than in philosophy, we are always inclined to look in the direction of matter, that is to say towards what is most distant in the world and strangest to our thought, to find a principle by which to understand things. This instinctive gesture, which makes us continually stretch out towards the most tangible, arises from a great illusion. The simplest reflexion should convince us that in so far as the knowledge of material characteristics and the analysis of corpuscular complexities are indispensable to our inquiry into cosmic energies and the extension of our views on the structure of the universe, they can only be a slight help when our aim is to see deep into nature and the history of the universe’s development. The closer things are to us in age and nature, the more we hope to find their organization intact, and the more likely their movements are to be familiar to us, that is to say knowable. For this double reason, what we know best in the universe is life; and in life those zones that were formed last and are nearest to our zoological group. It is indisputable that, in order to best recognize the existence and procedure of an animal evolution, it is the branch of vertebrates that we must study, and on it the last bough is put forth, that of the mammals.

Why not follow this argument to the end and ask man to explain the mammals? If humanity were an absolutely heterogeneous formation, artificially stuck on to the biosphere, we could understandably treat it as an ‘obscure quantity,’ from which we could expect no light to illuminate the rest of life. But if, as we have admitted, the human sheet, despite the profound and critical change that marks its appearance, is in fact not so divorced from the lower animal zones as not to continue their fundamental structure, then undoubtedly it is to this youngest of life’s productions we must turn—the one, moreover, whose internal constitution is best known to us—in order to reconstruct the movement that gave us birth.

Let us try therefore to understand the biosphere by the Noösphere. let us ask the nearest planes of our world and not its most distant horizons to show us the true perspective of things; and we shall be surprised to find how simple and plausible a shape the pattern of the world takes, when thus deciphered. We shall not fail to notice either how strongly, in return, this vision confirms the scientific reality of a ‘hominization’ of life.

On the sole condition that we regard it as organically (and not only ideally) an extension of animal life, humanity reveals the world to us in two ways: first, since it is an extremely new zoological group, almost at its point of birth, we find in it, still in process of formation (and therefore we cannot deny their evolutionary nature) the principal characteristics that mark the oldest and most fixed zoological unities; and secondly, since it is our own group, we are able to discover (in the very movement that pulls and diversifies the human species) the hidden springs (lying in our own deep consciousness) of that evolution which we have accepted as true in the world outside us.

1. Biological evolution traced in the present-day course of Humanity.

When, after an inquiry laboriously pursued through the maze of living and vanished animal forms, we decide to bring our gaze back to human history, we have to admit that our eyes would not have had to wander so far in search of the fact and fundamental laws of evolution if they had been better accustomed at the beginning to perceive the outlines and connections of living beings. The observation of zoological types gathered from the four quarters of space and time has shown us many things about the law of distribution by which organisms were scattered over the surface of the Earth and through the geological beds. But we can see all the harmonies it has shown us, all the paradoxes it has forced us to admit, reproduced in different colours but in the same details in us and around us. We have no need to look outside Humanity.

Transformism, as an empirical construction, inclines us to think that living groups appear, succeed, and interrupt one another, rather like waves. Each group, it seems, is born in a restricted zoological and geographical domain, beginning with a small number of individuals that have reached the same organic stage and similarly conditioned surroundings; and from here it spreads with more or less success over the surface of the Earth. Indiscernible at first, because so small, it gradually assumes an importance which allows it to leave, in the form of fossils, indelible traces of its passage; it grows, but at the same time it disintegrates and hardens. Broken up by the extension of its sheet, which must differentiate in order to conform to the necessities of its internal equilibrium, it sends out verticils of forms adapted to special conditions of activity or habitat; and each of these forms, like a shoot that has lignified or an over dentated leaf, soon shows itself unfit, from lack of suppleness or excessive complication, for any new morphological attainment. Thus dissociated or immobilized, the class, order, kind, or species cease to expand; they first fragmentate and finally disappear among younger and more vigorous living sheets, where their isolated remains may trail on almost indefinitely as wreckage.

Here, briefly sketched, is the picture of the developments of Life that zoologists have succeeded in reconstructing. Did they really discover it outside themselves? Or, quite simply, and unconsciously, have they recognized and expressed themselves in it? One thing is certain: in making this design they have reproduced the portrait of humanity feature by feature.

Man, in so far as we can understand him scientifically, appeared very humbly, in a narrowly limited region of life and earth. Deeply rooted among the primates, probably born in a very small space of the Ancient World, he succeeded, almost without notable morphological changes, in invading and dominating the entire Earth. We sometimes wonder uneasily how species and kinds can really be formed. Why not learn the lesson from an example that is close to us? Did not man, who is not divided from other animals by much more than the interval of a mutation, become more powerful and (to a seeing eye) more differentiated than an order or even a class? To guide or confirm our imagination, baffled by the envisaged consequences of transformism, and powerless to face all these ‘beginnings,’ let us take a look at humanity. Many people will not know how or will not wish to take this look. Close though it is to us, compared with other origins, the birth of humanity is still a distant and bitterly controversial fact. Let us leave it therefore; and for something certain and indisputable, let us look still nearer ourselves. The general movement has its replicas. Right in the midst of the human sheet, the zoological waves continue endlessly and in more and more elementary groups, to be born and to meet. By countless reductions of the fundamental evolution of the species, races and civilizations succeed one another within humanity. They arise, spread, cross in different directions, and die; and like the beach after a series of ebb tides, each continent is fringed with the foam and debris successively left behind by their waves. No one will attempt to deny that these reduced harmonics of the great human oscillation are of an evolutionary nature. What do they show us but the repetition, and therefore the confirmation or explanation, of what we can learn by observing the non-human layers of life?

In the history of the peoples who grow or supplant one another, we sometimes manage to distinguish the tribe or population whose success has given birth to a great civilization. But more often we come against the implacable law which, preventing our vision of beginnings (too humble to be perceptible), allows us to see the movement of the past only in the form of a series of fixed elements with sizeable maxima and established successes. And here, exactly reproduced, is the continuous distribution of beings so familiar to paleontology. Let us now take a detailed look at the swarm of human branches; and we shall be able to collect at will the different kinds of history by which the complexities and difficulties of the zoological lines arise. First of all, there is the impoverished, stagnant race, that has not changed since prehistoric times and seems likely to perish rather than change; and here, beside it, the vigorous, conquering people which grows continuously, draws all the sap to itself, and seems to represent not only the active extremity of a secondary branch, but the very leading shoot of humanity. Here now are the simple groups, in which everyone is doing the same thing, and here are the complicated, inventive nations in which the individuals divide into all sorts of specialized categories. Here too are the long periods of immobility, the winter of the peoples during which nothing stirs, and here are the phases of blossoming, in the course of which, mysteriously and at a thousand different points of the human layer, suddenly the same ideas, the same aspirations, the same inventions germinate. Here, in its turn, is the long series of vital declines: the exhaustion and ageing of the races, their collapse into lassitude, their encrustation beneath social envelopes which have become gilded and sterile castes, their stiffening under collective and individual routine; and here, finally, above this neo-matter in constant process of forming and rejecting, vast and ancient matter reappears. As imponderable in appearance as the inorganic world beneath the impassive mask of statistical laws, the determinism of great numbers and the painful friction of unorganized masses cover and level the quivering inner sheet of the Noösphere.

We always persuade ourselves that these analogies are literary comparisons. Why do we not see that they are the actual reality? If we want to understand life scientifically, we must consequently not hesitate to ask questions of ourselves?

2. The psychic Essence of Evolution.

When, at the beginning of these pages we pointed out the natural quality beneath the human artifice, we hinted at the explanation of life to which the views here developed on hominization will lead. The tool, as we have repeatedly said, is the equivalent in the human series of the differentiated organ in the animal series; the equivalent, that is to say the true homologue and not the superficial imitation born of a commonplace convergence. But once this equivalence between the results of an operation that we call industrial in man and organic in the animal is admitted, we are led to suppose some equivalence and relationship in the operation itself; for the power of invention corresponds to the thing being invented. And we see immediately, as through an open breach, psychic energies invading the domain of transformism from within.

It is certainly not a question of anthropomorphically transporting the methods and reflexion characteristic of the Noösphere into the lower spheres of life. It is not a question either of lazily reverting to a consideration of the vital forces which would excuse us from an analytical search for the elementary energies unconsciously woven by life as a cover for its need to perceive and act. Our meaning is that in noting the connections between man’s activity with his tools and the natural activities of life, we are led to conclude that this use of tools is only a transformed extension, a superior aspect of these natural activities. Our aspirations and powers of invention reveal themselves as this same organogenic power of life ‘hominized.’ And, reciprocally, the whole evolutionary process of the organic world becomes comprehensible when placed in analogy with the developments of our human world.

We are far from suggesting that this is a new perspective, and claim for it only an empirical value. It has, however, patently the prime advantage of harmonizing with what we see outside us in the birth, development, and death of zoological lines; phenomena, as we have said, which all so curiously remind us of what is going on around us in the domain of ideas, languages, physical discoveries, and social institutions. But it has a more considerable advantage still: it tells us what constitutes the hidden motor or movement of life. Let us admit (as we do) that organic life under cover of the determinisms analysed by biological science is, like our conscious life, an infinite fumbling and perpetual discovery. But we must take one further step. Why do we ourselves seek and why do we invent? In order to be better; and, above all, in order to be more, stronger and more conscious. Why, therefore, does all the rest of life stir and strive? In order—there can be no doubt—to be more, to understand better. It must be so, for life invents! And here is the lightning-flash that illuminates the biosphere to its depths from the moment when natural contact is re-established between its lowest layers and its human envelope. By a method that scarcely rises above that of simple observation we are able to make contact with the intuitions to which metaphysics is becoming increasingly wedded. Nothing really exists in the Universe except myriads of more or less obscure spontaneities, the compressed swarm of which gradually forces the barrier separating it from liberty. From top to bottom of the series of beings, everything is in motion, everything is raising itself, organizing itself in a single direction, which is that of the greatest consciousness. This is why, since the origins of life, nervous systems in every branch of animals have always been increasing and perfecting themselves to the point that never since the dawn of geological time has the mass of cerebralized matter been larger.

It must be maintained that scholars are abundantly right in setting a high value on the marks life makes on living flesh, or leaves on fossilized remains. But let them beware, in the course of their work, not to lose or even to reverse the sense of the values they are considering. It is not the tissues and bones that have made living creatures. Bones and tissues are only the shells in which psychic tendencies have successively clothed themselves; and these tendencies were the product always of the same fundamental aspiration to know and act.

And so we are brought to a better understanding of this single critical point encountered by life on Earth on the appearance of humanity. On account of a property, difficult for our reason to understand, but the reality of which is vouched for by the facts, we observe that animal psychism2 could not continue indefinitely to unify without finding itself as if compelled to a change of nature. In the act of diminution, the sections of the cone must be succeeded by its pointed tip. Similarly, by virtue of the organic laws of the movement animating it, terrestrial consciousness has attained a new stage. By coming closer together, its generating lines, hitherto unarranged, have united in a definite centre; and all at the same time, it has acquired the three fundamental properties that characterize the elements of the Noösphere; it has seen itself by reflexion; it has found itself capable of collaborating in its own further progress by invention; and finally it has become fit to conquer, by spiritual relationship and sympathy, the dissolvent effect that accompanies all individualization. It has appeared as a possible element in a sort of higher organism which might form itself, one from all, by conspiration. Now we see a little better why man is distinguished at once so much and so little from the great mass of other animals. Specialized at the very axis of life, he has had no need (and it would have been an irremediable weakness for him) to assume any of the particular forms which zoologists see as the distinguishing marks and advantages of other animal groups. In him, progress is made not by acquisition of particular organs, but by development of the very sources of action. In this way he has kept his liberty of movement at the maximum. In the incredibly varied jungle of animal forms, he has remained (even judged from the simple, zoological point of view) the vertebrate, the mammal, the living being, par excellence.

Most probably, the external human type will not change again. Life on Earth, the purest sap of which has passed to humanity, does not seem to have in reserve any form that can ever relay our race in its climb towards the highest consciousness.

Hominization has unleashed an immense force on the world: this is the material fact that we have studied so far. But at the same time it has introduced, correlatively, into the conduct of life formidable risks, in which human knowledge discovers the problem of evil at its origins. We will conclude our sketch of the grandeurs and novelty of the phenomenon of man with a brief examination of this fact.

Till man's appearance, beings, ignorant of their strength and future, worked unconsciously (and in consequence faithfully) for the general progress of life. Attracted by immediate needs or urged by an obscure instinct, they unconsciously went straight ahead. Physical evil spurred them on, for there exists an initial disunity deeply rooted in matter, which is the source of pain and death. But the infinite fumblings of life worked patiently to reduce these disorders. And though tendencies to inertia and indiscipline (precursory signs of the times to come) already manifested themselves in individuals, the enormous bulk of living beings, polarized as a whole towards more or better being, raised itself unhesitatingly as a mass towards the higher regions of being. At that time life, poorly armed against outside enemies, had nothing to fear from itself. Its great danger, and at the same time its great strength, revealed themselves on the day when, in giving birth to humanity, it became conscious of itself. Man with his freedom to lend or refuse himself to the battle represents the fearful faculty of scanning and criticizing life. When man opens his eyes on the world, he perceives and compares its pains and advantages. He distinguishes the two iron laws to which the animals bowed incomprehendingly (and hence without suffering) the necessity of denying themselves in order to grow and the necessity of death, and feels (the more deeply the more truly he is man) their burden and horror. Then, turning by reflection towards the universal reality which gave him birth, he finds himself obliged since he thinks to judge his own mother. Inevitably, by virtue of the uncontrollable forces presiding over the conscious burgeoning of the world, the temptation to revolt and the dangers that it brings for the future of existence appear at a given moment in the universe. Before the painful effort to continue, before the trial of death which must be met, courage or faith may fail us. In the depths of our prison we may recoil in savage isolation; or by a vain effort to break our chains, we may dissipate ourselves in desperate activities; or to still our anguish we may drown ourselves in pleasure. And immediately the impulse of life becomes slow, wavers, and declines.

This crisis of human activity is, by its nature, as old as man. It is abundantly clear that we must not confine it to a few brief instants or only to the origins of our race. Born with the intellect, the temptation to revolt must constantly change and grow with it. And this is why it has never appeared more acute and more universal than today.

The present zoological era, as we were saying a moment ago, is full of extraordinary novelty. It is positively renewing the face of the Earth. If we rightly understand at its just value the moral battle being fought before our eyes, we must go even further and declare that within this human era we are actually passing through a singular critical epoch. At each epoch in history, the last men to arrive have always found themselves in possession of an accumulated heritage of knowledge and science, that is to say faced with a more conscious choice between fidelity and infidelity to life, between Good and Evil. But just as in the life of individuals there are certain hours of awakening from which, by a sudden transformation, we emerge as adults, so in the general development of human consciousness, there come centuries during which the drama of initiation into the world, and consequently the inner struggle, suddenly occur. We are living at such a moment.

The prehistorians have observed it for a long time. If we try to fit our contemporary history into the general pattern of the human past (by applying the same method that has served us for fitting the human past into the general evolution of the Earth) we must conclude that we are standing, at the present moment, not only at a change of century and civilization, but at a change of epoch. Up to recent times nothing had essentially modified the conditions established in the prehistoric human layer by the coming of the agricultural peoples. No new source of energy had been discovered; man continued to use the same fire that his paleolithic fathers had lit; and he remained in fact limited in his views of the universe, weak in the midst of natural energies, dispersed in his efforts to achieve union. And then suddenly, prepared by the introduction of scientific and experimental methods, a great change begins. Man discovers the laws of chemical energy, he conquers the powers of the ether, he investigates the atomic and stellar abysses; he discovers endless extensions of his history into the past, infinite increases in his power of acting on matter. Infinite hopes open up for his spiritual achievement. Here, properly speaking, is the beginning of a new cycle. The Neolithic age, which is hardly over, is succeeded all around us, at this moment, by the age of industry, the age of Internationals, and at the same time, to a marked degree, the age of strikes and revolutions. Not only because of humanity's place in life, but because of our century's place in human history we now stand at a prodigiously interesting epoch in the Earth's story. Never so conscious of their individual and collective force, but never so pervaded either by dislike of the forces of injustice and horror of irremediable death, men have once more to choose before engaging in the service of evolution. ‘Does life which has made us what we are deserve that we should extend it further?’ At this present hour the great effort of hominization arouses this acute moral question in the heart of us all.

In this deep and universal confusion, where shall we find the light by which to see and the strength to follow the light? Only by means of a clearer and more realistic view of the great cause from which we might be tempted to declare our independence. A crisis of cosmic nature and magnitude, the social ferment which is today pervading human populations can only be dominated and guided by a clearer and more conscious faith in the supreme value of evolution.

It is continually repeated that evolution is a wicked doctrine, a fit vehicle for materialism and ideas of universal struggle. To comfort the world and teach it morality, our opponents seek to reduce and discredit this theory. A fatal tactic, we would cry, and designed only to accelerate the crisis that we are anxious to overcome. You are afraid of the desire for independence and pleasure which is spreading like wildfire through the world. You are seeking a means of disciplining individualism and abolishing cowardice. You will find no alternative but to exalt in men's eyes the greatness of the whole which they fail to recognize, and whose success might be impaired by their egoism. So long as only their individual advantage seems to them at stake in the Earth's adventure, and as long as they only feel compelled to work because of external commands, the men of our time will never submit their mind and will to anything greater than themselves. Explain to them, on the contrary, unhesitatingly, the greatness of the current of which they are part. Make them feel the immense weight of committed efforts for which they are responsible. Compel them to see themselves as conscious elements in the complete mass of beings, inheritors of a labour as old as the world, and charged with transmitting the accumulated capital to all those who are to come. Then, at the same time, you will have overcome their tendency to inertia and disorder, and shown them what they perhaps worshipped without giving it a name.

For this is the supreme purpose of the present human phase of terrestrial history; that the normal crisis which has struck us shall be compensated by the renewal and growth of our beings, in the double form of a necessity and an attraction, of a divine pressure emanating from the Absolute.

There is, as we have said, only one method to keep the indisciplined crowd of human monads bound to the task of life: to make the passion for the whole prevail in them over elementary egoism, that is to say practically to increase their consciousness of the general evolution of which they are a part. But why should they submit themselves to this evolution if they are not traveling towards something that is for ever? More and more distinctly the dilemma in which human activity stands is revealed to the least of workers on Earth.

Either life s moving to no accumulation and consummation of its work: and then the world is absurd, self-destroying, condemned by the first reflective glance which it has attained at the cost of immense efforts; and then revolt is with us again, no longer as a temptation but as a duty.

Or else something (someone) exists, in which ea element gradually finds, by reunion with the whole, the completion of all the saveable elements that have been formed in its individuality; and then it is worth while bending and even devoting oneself to labour; but with an effort that takes the form of adoration.

Thu the interior equilibrium of what we have called the Noösphere requires the presence perceived by individuals of a higher pole or centre that directs, sustains, and assembles the whole sheaf of our efforts. Would it be going too far and leaving the empirical realm to introduce at this point a new observation? Is not this divine centre, required by the nature of things to justify our activity, precisely He whose influence makes itself positively felt in us by the tendency to greater cohesion, justice, and brotherhood which has been for the last century the most comforting symptom to be seen around us in the inner development of humanity?

A wind of revolt is passing through our minds, it is true. But, born of the same growths of conscience, another breeze is blowing through the human masses; one that draws us all by a sort of living affinity towards the splendid realization of some foreseen unity. Disputed, suspect, and often scorned, unitary aspirations in politics, in thought, in mysticism, arise everywhere around us; and because their subject is not what is material and plural but what is spiritual and common to all in each one of us, no force of routine or egoism seems capable of arresting them; irresistibly they infiltrate and gradually dissolve old forms and false barriers.

It is our wish to seek in that supreme manifestation of biological forces surrounding us, a final and direct reason for admitting the distinct existence and believing in the certain future of a Noösphere. The infallible pull which, overcoming from the beginning the whims of chance, the disorder of matter, the sloth of the flesh and the pride of the spirit, has created man and continues to construct almost perceptibly, out of our souls a higher reality—this pull—I would say—gathers and consecrates (in fact and in faith) all that the analysis of the phenomenon of man has revealed to us in the course of this study. By its continuity it demonstrates the coherence of the deep movement which, starting from matter, culminates in spirit. By the higher form it assumes in our faculties for reflection and love, it marks the type of consummation represented in terrestrial life by the awakening of human thought. Finally, by its very appearance and perpetual rebirth, it provides evidence that a vital link has once and for all been established between our efforts, which hasten, and the upper goal, which directs the progress of hominization.

1. The spider’s web, for example. Recently the very curious case of certain ants has been cited, who sew leaves together, using as needles their larvae, which are endowed with the property of secreting a sort of silk. ↩
2. Sustained, of course, by some deep creative force. If we do not speak more explicitly of this force, it is, we repeat, because our purpose is to follow the shape of the apparent curve of phenomena without examining the metaphysical conditions of its existence. ↩