Researchers and thinkers almost always act as if even viewed by science man were a certain universe, and what is not man, another.
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.
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.
The realization by the collectivity of an organically linked unity.
The tool is one with the body, the living being passes into its invention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Special linking organs 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.
Our view of life is obscured and inhibited by the absolute division that we continually place between the natural and the artificial.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The present zoological era is full of extraordinary novelty. It is positively renewing the face of the Earth.
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.
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.
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.
There is 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.
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.