I have been insisting for a long time on the importance and significance of the technico-mental process which, particularly during the past hundred years, has been irresistibly causing Mankind to draw closer together and unite upon itself. From routine or prejudice the majority of anthropologists still refuse to see in this movement of totalization anything more than a superficial and temporary side effect of the organic forces of biogenesis. Any parallel that may be drawn between socialization and speciation, they maintain, is purely metaphorical. To which I would reply that, if this is so, to what undisclosed form of energy shall we scientifically attribute the irreversible and conjugated growth of arrangement and consciousness which historically characterizes (as it does everything else, in indisputably “biological” fields) the establishment of Mankind on Earth?
We have only to go a little further, I am convinced, and our minds, awakened at last to the existence of an added dimension, will grasp the profound identity existing between the forces of civilization and those of evolution. Man will then assume his true shape in the eyes of the naturalists—that of a species which, having entered the realm of thought, henceforth folds back its branches upon itself instead of spreading them. Man, a species which converges, instead of diverging like every other species on earth: so that we are bound to envisage its ending in terms of some paroxysmal state of maturation.
If, pursuing this thought, we accept the existence of a critical point of speciation at the conclusion of all technologies and civilizations, it means (with tension maintaining its ascendancy over rest to the end in biogenesis) that an outlet appears at the peak of time, not only for our hope of escape but for our expectation of some revelation.