Among animals, the life of the individual is clearly controlled, dominated even, by what one might call ‘the sense of the species.’ Under the complex action of automatic mechanisms and instinctive reflexes, the animal, untiringly and without understanding, never ceases working to ensure the integrity and survival of the zoological group to which it belongs: not, it is true, that one cannot already distinguish it in (at least in the case of the highest forms) a self-centred tendency in the individual to ‘save his own skin.’ This, however, occurs only as an exceptional or secondary manifestation. On the whole, and predominantly, the animal behaves as a link in evolution. The soma for the germen. Hence the sharply defined character, the impatience of adulteration, and the remarkable length (broken only, here and there, by some explosive mutation) of the phyletic lines of descent in palaeontology. All this makes itself apparent to us, to use anthropomorphic language, in the presumed existence, in the depths of every pre-human living being, of a double psychic polarization—a polarization simultaneously towards what lies ahead and towards the other: towards what lies ahead, in the form of a drive in the direction of what appears to be a greater organic complexity, which itself entails a greater degree of consciousness; and towards the other, in the form of a ‘sympathetic’ cohesion with the other members of the same phylum. In all cases, this double polarization is obeyed blindly. This explains the amazement we experience simply by watching ants scurrying to and fro at their work.

Starting with man, and as a consequence of the transition from instinct to reflection, a profound twofold change affects the course of action followed until then by evolution.

On the one hand, the individual (because he has become conscious of his ego ‘to the second degree’) finds that he attains a richness of life which, increasing almost without limit his own incommunicable values, makes him stand alone among his own kind, gives him an ‘absolute’ quality and makes him autonomous.

On the other hand, the phylum, as a result of its newly acquired ability to retain and synthesize with itself the branches that are constantly produces on its stem (instead of allowing them to diverge), tends to spread out uncontrollably in the form of an organically knit membrane or tissue, until it attains dimensions that are strictly planetary. By itself, the human ‘species’ constitutes nothing less than a new envelope of the globe: a ‘noosphere’ (or sphere of thought) above the biosphere.

There is an extraordinary accentuation of the soma—and (at first sight, at least) an extreme diffusion of the germen: two factors that operate in the same direction to upset (at least for the moment) the balance of biological values: a progressive and general granulation of the human mass: a gradual emancipation of the elements, which now, rejecting all control, set themselves up, each for himself, as the organic peak of the social structure. In other words, we have the loss of the sense of the species. Is not this, succeeding the residual co-consciousness found in primitive peoples,1 the new orientation, the new ‘orthogenesis,’ recorded by history for the human group, throughout the whole of the process we call civilization?

It is here that a cardinal fact comes into operation, one which it is strange that we can so easily overlook: by this I mean the enforced involution of the noosphere upon itself which is at the moment being initiated. From its origins until our own day, mankind (however close-knit its substance) has developed principally (or so at least it would appear) under the old aegis of multiplication and divergence. Its first concern was to occupy the earth. Now, with that first objective attained—that is, with the expansive phase of population reaching its term—it is becoming clear that hominization is coming under the combined and irresistible influence of two planetary curves of progress, the one spatial, and the other psychic: as a result of this we can now see it entering a compressive phase from which it cannot emerge. For on the closed surface of the globe a continually increasing mass of elements (each one of which has a radius of action and cohesion which grows wider as socialization grows more marked) cannot fail to extend its co-penetration and totalization more and more.

The meaning, I know, if not the reality, of this totalizing process is still a subject of argument. Does the phenomenon represent simply a materializing mechanism, a sort of retrogression or senescence—a disease of the species that must be suffered as stoically as possible? Or on the contrary has it not, rather, a biological value, inasmuch as it corresponds to the direct continuation, on a supra-individual scale, above our level, of that very mechanism of ‘complexification’ to which the vitalization of matter can experimentally be reduced? We have only, I believe, to note to hat a degree human consciousness becomes more highly charged2 in step with planetary socialization, to realize that of the two conflicting ways of answering the question, it is the second that corresponds to the direction indicated by the facts.

This can only mean, in that case, that now that modern man has been sharply brought back to a sense of reality by the sudden pressure around him of the forces of totalization, he must reject as an illusion the idea that he can reach the peak of his own fundamental being in isolation, egoistically, ‘individualistically.’ No: there is no end waiting for each one of us, within a universe undergoing the involution that engenders spirit, other than the end of mankind itself. There is no way out, therefore, open to our individual drive towards survival and super-life, other than resolutely to plunge back into the general current from which we thought, for a moment, we could escape. And if we are to carry out that deliberate act, there is (from psychological necessity) no possible way of doing so other than to re-animate and renew ourselves, to the measure of the new age, the sense of the species.

In animals, I recalled when I began, the sense of the species is essentially a blind urge toward reproduction and multiplication, within the phylum.

In man, by virtue of the two allied phenomena of reflection and social totalization, the equivalent of this inner dynamism in a different context can only be a reasoned urge towards fulfilment (both individual and collective, each being produced through the other), followed in the direction of the best arrangement of all the hominized substance which makes up what I earlier called the noosphere.

The best arrangement with a view to a maximum hominization of the noosphere.

From this there follows, as a first priority, a fundamental concern to ensure (by correct nutrition, by education, and by selection) an ever more advanced eugenics of the human zoological type on the surface of the earth.

At the same time, however, and even more markedly, there must be an ever more intense effort directed towards discovery and vision, animate by the hope of our gradually, as one man, putting our hands on the deep-seated forces (physico-chemical, biological, and psychic) which provide the impetus of evolution.

Finally, and at the same time, inasmuch as evolution is tending, quite rightly, to be identified (at least so far as our field of vision extends) with hominization,3 there must be a never-failing concern to stimulate, within the personalized living mass, the development of the affective energies which are the ultimate generators of union: a sublimated sense of sex, and a generalized sense of man.

In short, there must be a collective faith (active and productive of unanimity) in some maturing of mankind still to come: such, if we wish not to be crushed but to be fulfilled by the totalizing involution of the noosphere, is the attitude of mind which that process forces upon us: it calls for the new sense of the species.

Precisely, however, for such a faith to be possible, something further is necessary. The universe must show itself to be capable of kindling and maintaining in us a sufficiently powerful illumination of hope and a sufficient warmth of love. No end awaits man, I said earlier, other than the end of mankind itself; but if this end of mankind is to be worthy of attainment, if it is to be tempting to us, it is essential that it present itself to us (both to our minds and to our hearts) in the form of some issue that opens on to indefinite freedom: an issue that widens out into full consciousness, through all the forces of death and materialization.

There is no future for man, I repeat, without the neo-sense of the species.

But there can be no neo-sense of the species, we must be at pains to note, outside a universe which, by its nature, converges irresistibly upon some centre of ultra-personalization.

1. Cf. Gerald Heard, The Ascent of Humanity, London, 1929. ↩
2. This rise makes itself felt today in the vigorous expansion of a scientific outlook—while tomorrow we may anticipate other more profound effects which will reach the mind’s esthetic and mystical levels. ↩
3. In this sense, that in our more informed view man is no longer simply the artisan but also the object of an auto-evolution, which is seen to coincide, at its term, with a concerted reflection of all the elementary human reflections, now mutually inter-reflective. ↩