Nothing, absolutely nothing—we may as well make up our minds to it—can arrest the progress of social Man towards ever greater interdependence and cohesion.
It would be easier, at the stage of evolution we have reached, to prevent the Earth from revolving than to prevent Mankind from becoming totalised.
In a Mankind becoming unified under pressure, its organs tending in consequence to achieve planetary dimensions, it is inevitable that the mechanical equipment of society will become all-pervading and enormous.
What has really let loose the Machine in the world, and for good, is that it both facilitates and indefinitely multiplies our activities. Not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labour; but by the miraculous enhancing of our senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration, and exact measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfils the dream of all living creatures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a minimum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how can Mankind fail to pursue it?
Nothing is more impossible than to inhibit the growth of an idea.
How can we fail to discern in the simultaneous rise of Society, the Machine, and Thought this threefold tide that is bearing us upwards, the essential and primordial process of Life itself—I mean, the organic in-folding of Cosmic matter upon itself, whereby ever-increasing unity, accompanied by ever-heightened awareness, is achieved by ever more complicated structural arrangements?
The human social group cannot escape from certain irreversible laws of evolution.
Man is collectively immersed in a ‘vortex’ of organisation which, operating above the level of the individual, gathers and lifts individuals as a whole towards the heightening of their power of reflection by means of a surplus of technical complexity.
The centre of consciousness cannot achieve its natural growth rising out of the technical centre of social organisation. Only union through love and in love (using the word ‘love’ in its widest and most real sense of ‘mutual internal affinity’), because it brings individuals together, not superficially and tangentially but centre to centre, can physically possess the property of not merely differentiating but also personalising the elements which comprise it. Even under the irresistible compulsion of the pressures causing it to unite, Mankind will only find and shape itself if men can learn to love one another in the very act of draing closer.
The more we study the past, noting the steady rise of Life over millions of years, and observing the ever-growing multitude of reflective elements engaged in the construction of the Noösphere; the more must we be convinced that by a sort of ‘infallibility of large numbers’ Mankind, the present crest of the evolutionary wave, cannot fail in the course of its guided probings to find the right road and an outlet for its higher ascent.