Though for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static: they are always processes or parts of processes. The different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organisation, which can properly be called a genesis or an evolution.
He coined the term noösphere to denote the sphere of mind, as opposed to, or rather superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life, and acting as a transforming agency promoting hominisation (or as I would put it, progressive psychosocial evolution).
A rich and potent pattern of variety-in-unity.
East and West are culturally complementary, and both are needed for the further synthesis and unification of world and thought.
Comparative study makes it clear that higher animals have minds of a sort, and evolutionary fact and logic demand that minds should have evolved gradually as well as bodies and that accordingly mind-like (or ‘mentoid,’ to employ a barbarous word that I am driven to coin because of its usefulness) properties must be present throughout the universe.
Some biologists, indeed, would claim that mind is generated solely by the complexification of certain types of organisation, namely brains. However, such logic appears to me narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation. Indeed an isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as an isolated human individual.
He saw with his mind’s eye that ‘the banal fact of the earth’s roundness’—the sphericity of man’s environment—was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environment, man’s thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards: it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy.
The noösphere incorporates ever more facts of the cosmos, including the facts of its general direction and its trends in time, so as to become more truly a microcosm, which (like all incorporated knowledge) is both a mirror and a directive agency.
He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration—integration of the self with the outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other. He is a person, an organism which has transcended individuality in personality. This attainment of personality was an essential element in man’s past and present evolutionary success: accordingly its fuller achievement must be an essential aim for his evolutionary future.
The culmination of two major evolutionary trends—the trend towards more extreme individuation, and that towards more extensive interrelation and co-operation: persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation.
The process of evolution on earth is itself now in the process of becoming cephalised. Before the appearance of man, life consisted of a vast array of separate branches, linked only by an unorganised pattern of ecological interaction. The incipient development of mankind into a single psychosocial unit, with a single noösystem or common pool of thought, is providing the evolutionary process with the rudiments of a head. It remains for our descendants to organise this global noösystem more adequately, so as to enable mankind to understand the process of evolution on earth more fully and to direct it more adequately.
In modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself.
We should consider interthinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny is to realise new possibilities for evolving life on this planet. Accordingly, we should endeavour to equip it with the mechanisms necessary for the proper fulfilment of its task—the psychosocial equivalents of sense-organs, effector organs, and a co-ordinating central nervous system with dominant brain; and our aim should be the gradual personalisation of the human unit of evolution—its conversion, on the new level of co-operative interthinking, into the equivalent of a person.
The entire phenomenal universe, including man, was revealed as a process of evolution.
It is no longer possible to maintain that science and religion must operate in thought-tight compartments or concern separate sectors of life; they are both relevant to the whole of human existence. The religiously-minded can no longer turn their backs upon the natural world, or seek escape from its imperfections in a supernatural world; nor can the materialistically-minded deny importance to spiritual experience and religious feeling.
The evolution of life becomes a comprehensible phenomenon. It is an anti-entropic process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its degradation of energy and its tendency to uniformity. With the aid of the sun’s energy, biological evolution marches uphill, producing increased variety and higher degrees of organisation. It also produces more varied, more intense and more highly organised mental activity or awareness. During evolution, awareness (or if you prefer, the mental properties of living matter) becomes increasingly important to organisms, until in mankind it becomes the most important characteristic of life, and gives the human type its dominant position.
Evolution takes on a new character: it becomes primarily a psychosocial process, based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its results, and working through an organised system of awareness, a combined operation of knowing, feeling and willing. In man, at least during the historical and proto-historical periods, evolution has been characterised more by cultural than by genetic or biological change.
On this new psychosocial level, the evolutionary process leads to new types and higher degrees of organisation. On the one hand there are new patterns of co-operation among individuals—co-operation for practical control, for enjoyment, for education, and notably in the last few centuries, for obtaining new knowledge; and on the other there are new patterns of thought, new organisations of awareness and its products.
The conditions of advance are these: global unity of mankind’s noetic organisation or system of awareness, but a high degree of variety within that unity; love with goodwill and full co-operation; personal integration and internal harmony; and increasing knowledge.
Knowledge is basic. It is knowledge which enables us to understand the world and ourselves, and to exercise some control or guidance. It sets us in a fruitful and significant relation with the enduring process of the universe.
The history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.
When studied narrowly in himself by anthropologists or jurists, man is a tiny, even a shrinking, creature. His overpronounced individuality conceals from our eyes the whole to which he belongs; as we look at him our minds incline to break nature up into pieces and to forget both its deep inter-relations and its measureless horizons.
I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes, and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised in him.
Up to now we have been looking at matter as such, that is to say according to its qualities and in any given volume—as though it were permissible for us to break off a fragment and study this sample apart from the rest. It is time to point out that this procedure is merely an intellectual dodge.
The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts. Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others: from beneath itself by the mysterious phenomenon of ‘composition,’ which makes it subsistent through the apex of an organised whole; and from above through the influence of unities of a higher order which incorporate and dominate it for their own ends.
This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes.
The apparent restriction of the phenomenon of consciousness to the higher forms of life has long served science as an excuse from eliminating it from its models of the universe. A queer exception, an aberrant function, an epiphenomenon—thought was classed under one or other of these heads in order to get rid of it.
The inner face of the world is manifest deep within our human consciousness, and there reflects upon itself.
Seen from outside and materially, the best we can say at the moment is that life properly speaking begins with the cell. For a century science has concentrated its attention on this chemically and structurally ultra-complex unit, and the longer it continues to do so the more evident it becomes that in it lies the secret of which we have as yet no more than an inkling—the secret of the connection between the two worlds of physics and biology.
We find a triumph of multiplicity organically contained within a minimum of space.
Cells still seem to resemble one another more as molecules do than as animals do. We are right to look on them as the first of living forms. But are we not equally entitled to view them as the representatives of another state of matter, something as original in its way as the electronic, the atomic, the crystalline, or the polymerous? As a new type of material for a new stage of the universe?
Surely it is natural that life, as it just emerges from matter, should be ‘dripping with molecularity.’
From the moment when the monad acquires the dimensions and superior spontaneity of a cell, and tends to be individualised at the heart of a pleiad, a more complicated pattern appears in the stuff of the universe.
The first veil of organised matter spread over the earth could neither have established nor maintained itself without some network of influences and exchanges which made it a biologically cohesive whole. From its origin, the cellular nebula necessarily represented, despite its internal multiplicity, a sort of diffuse super-organism. Not merely a foam of lives but, to a certain extent, itself a living film. A simple reappearance, after all, in more advanced form and on a higher level of those much older conditions which we have already seen presiding over the birth and equilibrium of the first polymerised substances on the surface of the early earth.
Seen from afar, elementary life looks like a variegated multitude of microscopic elements, a multitude great enough to envelop the earth, yet at the same time sufficiently interrelated and selected to form a structural whole of genetic solidarity.
There is for science a particular class of facts to be considered—specifically the most important because the rarest and most significant—those which depend neither on direct observation nor experiment, but can only be brought to light by a very authentic branch of ‘physics,’ the discovery of the past. And, to judge by our repeated failures to find its equivalent around us or to reproduce it, the first apparition of living bodies is clearly one of the most sensational of these events.
Thanks to its characteristic additive power, living matter (unlike the matter of physicists) finds itself ‘ballasted’ with complications and instability. It falls, or rather rises, towards forms that are more and more improbable.
On the one hand the individual unit is lost in number, on the other it is torn apart in the collectivity, and in yet a third direction it stretches out in becoming. This dramatic and perpetual opposition between the one born of the many and the many constantly being born of the one runs right through evolution.
To see life properly we must never lose sight of the unity of the biosphere that lies beyond the plurality and essential rivalry of individual beings.
Once they have attained their definite form at the end of each verticillate ray, the elements of a phylum tend to come together and form societies just as surely as the atoms of a solid body tend to crystallise.
Added together, the hundreds of thousands of names in our catalogues do not amount to one millionth of the leaves that have sprouted so far on the tree of life.
Now we can see the tree of life standing before us. A strange tree, no doubt. We could call it the negative of a tree, for contrary to what happens with our great forest trees, its branches and trunk are revealed to our eyes only by ever-widening gaps; an almost petrified tree, as it appears to us, so long do the buds take to open. Many that are half-opened now we shall never know in any other state. A clearly drawn tree, none the less, with its superimposed foliage of living species. In its main lines and vast dimensions, it stands there before us covering all the earth.
We can go on for years arguing about the way in which the enormous organism could have come into being. As we look closer at the bewildering complexity of the mechanism, our brains begin to reel. How are we to reconcile this persistent growth with the determinism of the molecules, the blind play of the chromosomes, the apparent incapacity to transmit individual acquisitions by generation?
Though we take it apart, we still cannot understand how the machine works. This may well be, but the machine is meanwhile standing in front of us; and it works all the same.
That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now, as I have said, common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question. Asked whether life is going anywhere at the end of its transformations, nine biologists out of ten will today say no, even passionately.
Of course there exists in living organisms a selective mechanism for the play of consciousness. We have merely to look into ourselves to perceive it—the nervous system. We are in a positive way aware of one single ‘interiority’ in the world: our own directly, and at the same time that of other men by immediate equivalence, thanks to language. But we have every reason to think that in animals too a certain inwardness exists, approximately proportional to the development of their brains.
To jolt the individual out of his natural laziness and the rut of habit, and also from time to time to break up the collective frameworks in which he is imprisoned, it is indispensable that he should be shaken and prodded from outside. What would we do without our enemies?
If we wish to settle this question of the ‘superiority’ of man over the animals (and it is every bit as necessary to settle it for the sake of the ethics of life as well as for pure knowledge) I can only see one way of doing so—to brush resolutely aside all those secondary and equivocal manifestations of inner activity in human behaviour, making straight for the central phenomenon, reflection.
Reflection is, as the word indicates, the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows. By this individualisation of itself in the depths of itself, the living element, which heretofore had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of perceptions and activities, was constituted for the first time as a centre in the form of a point at which all the impressions and experiences knit themselves together and fuse into a unity that is conscious of its own organisation.
The being who is the object of its own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon itself, becomes in a flash able to raise itself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love—all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed centre as it explodes onto itself.
The cell has become ‘someone.’ After the grain of matter, the grain of life; and now at last we see constituted the grain of thought.
Until now it was enough to consider in nature a simple vibration on a wide front, the ascent of individual centres of consciousness. What we now have to do is to define and regulate harmoniously an ascent of consciousnesses (a much more delicate phenomenon). We are dealing with a progress made up of other progresses as lasting as itself; a movement of movements.
The personalisation of the individual by the ‘hominisation’ of the whole group.
From the advent of man difficulties appear. We cannot fail to be aware of the extreme confusion which prevails concerning the significance and the distribution of the extremely varied groups into which mankind divides up under our very eyes—races, nations, states, countries, cultures, etc. In these diverse and constantly shifting categories, people as a rule only care to see heterogeneous units—some natural (race), others artificial (nations)—overlapping irregularly on different planes. It is an unpleasing and unnecessary irregularity, and one which vanishes as soon as we give its proper place to the within as well as the without of things.
I referred to the unparalleled complexity of the human group—all those races, those nations, those states whose entanglements defy the resourcefulness of anatomists and ethnologists alike. There are so many rays in that spectrum that we despair of analysing them. Let us try instead to perceive what this multiplicity represents when viewed as a whole. If we do this we will see that its disturbing aggregation is nothing but a multitude of sequins all sending back to each other by reflection the same light. We find hundreds or thousands of facets, each expressing at a different angle a reality which seeks itself among a world of groping forms. We are not astonished (because it happens to us) to see in each person around us the spark of reflection developing year by year. We are all conscious, too, at all events vaguely, that something in our atmosphere is changing with the course of history.
How is it that we are not more sensitive to the presence of something greater than ourselves moving forward within us and in our midst?
Science has grounds for recognising another phenomenon of a reflective nature co-extensive with the whole of mankind. Here as elsewhere in the universe, the whole shows itself to be greater than the simple sum of the elements of which it is formed.
Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.
The biological change of state terminating in the awakening of thought does not represent merely a critical point that the individual or even the species must pass through. Vaster than that, it affects life itself in its organic totality, and consequently it marks a transformation affecting the state of the entire planet.
When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.
A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence. Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the ‘thinking layer,’ which, since its germination at the end of the Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noösphere.
With hominisation, in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the beginning of a new age. The earth ‘gets a new skin.’ Better still, it finds its soul.
This sudden deluge of cerebralisation, this biological invasion of a new animal type which gradually eliminates or subjects all forms of life that are not human, this irresistible tide of fields and factories, this immense and growing edifice of matter and ideas—all these signs that we look at, for days on end—to proclaim that there has been a change on the earth and a change of planetary magnitude.
To a Martian capable of analysing sidereal radiations psychically no less than physically, the first characteristic of our planet would be, not the blue of the seas or the green of the forests, but the phosphorescence of thought.
A consciousness not merely reflecting upon itself, but rejoicing in so doing.
At the cost of what we are enduring, life is taking a step, and a decisive step, in us and in our environment. After the long maturation that has been steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural centuries, the hour has come at last, characterised by the birth pangs inevitable in another change of state.
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations—this great organism lives, in final analysis, only because of, and for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath a change of age lies a change of thought. Where are we to look for it, where are we to situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without appreciably changing our bodies, has made new creatures of us? In one place and one only—in a new intuition involving a total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we move—in other words, in an awakening.
What has made us in four or five generations so different from our forebears (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered and mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along, and have thereby realised the formidable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human effort.
The least molecule is, in nature and in position, a function of the whole sidereal process, and the least of the protozoa is structurally so knit into the web of life that its existence cannot be hypothetically annihilated without ipso facto undoing the whole network of the biosphere.
In the last century and a half the most prodigious event, perhaps, ever recorded by history since the threshold of reflection has been taking place in our minds: the definitive access of consciousness to a scale of new dimensions; and in consequence the birth of an entirely renewed universe, without any change of line or feature by the simple transformation of its intimate substance.
Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself, to borrow Julian Huxley’s striking expression. It seems to me that our modern minds (because and inasmuch as they are modern) will never find rest until they settle down to this view. On this summit and on this summit alone are repose and illumination waiting for us.
The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.
From the early earth onwards, we have followed going upwards the successive advances of consciousness in matter undergoing organisation. Having reached the peak, we can now turn round and, looking downwards, take in the pattern of the whole.
Is there after all such a great difference from the point of view of the expansion of life between a vertebrate either spreading its limbs or equipping them with feathers, and an aviator soaring on wings with which he has had the ingenuity to provide himself?
The spirit of research and conquest is the permanent soul of evolution.
Tomorrow? But who can guarantee us a tomorrow anyway? And without the assurance that this tomorrow exists, can we really go on living, we to whom has been given—perhaps for the first time in the whole story of the universe—the terrible gift of foresight?
What are the minimum requirements to be fulfilled before we can say that the road ahead of us is open? There is only one, but it is everything. It is that we should be assured the space and the chances to fulfil ourselves, that is to say, to progress till we arrive (directly or indirectly, individually or collectively) at the utmost limits of ourselves. This is an elementary request, a basic wage, so to speak, veiling nevertheless a stupendous demand. But is not the end and aim of thought that still unimaginable farthest limit of a convergent sequence, propagating itself without end and ever higher? Does not the end or confine of thought consist precisely in not having a confine? Unique in this respect among all the energies of the universe, consciousness is a dimension to which it is inconceivable and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling or to suppose that it can double back upon itself.
Our mind, by the very fact of being able to discern infinite horizons ahead, is only able to move by the hope of achieving, through something of itself, a supreme consummation—without which it would rightly feel itself to be stunted, frustrated and cheated.
Even under the spur of immediate fear or desire, without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance. And, stricken at the very source of the impetus which sustains it, it would disintegrate from nausea or revolt and crumble into dust.
If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say: ‘What’s the good of it all?’ our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt—because we are evolution.
Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.
What more do we need to convince ourselves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must make clearer.
In the course of a few generations all sorts of economic and cultural links have been forged around us and they are multiplying in geometric progression. Nowadays, over and above the bread which to simple Neolithic man symbolised food, each man demands his daily ration of iron, copper and cotton, of electricity, oil and radium, of discoveries, of the cinema and of international news. It is no longer a simple field, however big, but the whole earth which is required to nourish each one of us. If words have any meaning, is this not like some great body which is being born—with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory—the body in fact of that great Thing which had to come to fulfil the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness that he was at one with and responsible for an evolutionary All?
From now on we envisage, beside and above individual realities, the collective realities that are not reducible to the component element.
We pick up the problem again at the point at which the realisation of the confluence of human thoughts had already led us. Being a collective reality, and therefore sui generis, mankind can only be understood to the extent that, leaving behind its body of tangible constructions, we try to determine the particular type of conscious synthesis emerging from its laborious and industrious concentration. It is in the last resort only definable as a mind.
Now from this point of view and in the present condition of things, there are two ways, through two stages, in which we can picture the form mankind will assume tomorrow—either (and this is simpler) as a common power and act of knowing and doing, or (and this goes much deeper) as an organic superaggregation of souls. In short: science or unanimity.
With our knowledge of hormones we appear to be on the eve of having a hand in the development of our bodies and even of our brains. With the discovery of genes it appears that we shall soon be able to control the mechanism of organic heredity. And with the synthesis of albuminoids imminent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life.
The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world.
What does that amount to if not (and it is quite credible) that the stuff of the universe, by becoming thinking, has not yet completed its evolutionary cycle, and that we are therefore moving forward towards some new critical point that lies ahead. In spite of its organic links, whose existence has everywhere become apparent to us, the biosphere has so far been no more than a network of divergent lines, free at their extremities. By effect of reflection and the recoils it involves, the loose ends have been tied up, and the noösphere tends to constitute a single closed system in which each element sees, feels, desires and suffers for itself the same things as all the others at the same time.
We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection.
Something will explode if we persist in trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts the material and spiritual forces that are henceforward on the scale of a world.
The great human machine is designed to work and must work—by producing a super-abundance of mind. If it does not work, or rather if it produces only matter, this means that it has gone into reverse.
Only one reality seems to survive and be capable of succeeding and spanning the infinitesimal and the immense: energy—that floating, universal entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as into an ocean; energy, the new spirit; the new god. So, at the world’s Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal.
Are we not at every instant living the experience of a universe whose immensity, by the play of our senses and our reason, is gathered up more and more simply in each one of us? And in the establishment now proceeding through science and the philosophies of a collective human Weltanschauung in which every one of us co-operates and participates, are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an aggregation of a still higher order, the birth of some single centre from the convergent beams of millions of elementary centres dispersed over the surface of the thinking earth?
The mind, seen from our side, is essentially the power of synthesis and organisation.
What is the work of works for man if not to establish, in and by each one of us, an absolutely original centre in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way? And those centres are our very selves and personalities.
The concentration of a conscious universe would be unthinkable if it did not reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious; each particular consciousness remaining conscious of itself at the end of the operation, and even (this must absolutely be understood) each particular consciousness becoming still more itself and thus more clearly distinct from others the closer it gets to them.
Modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems. We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order. And with this admission, consciousness, life and thought are on the threshold of acquiring a right to existence in terms of science.
We have noticed that, since man’s advent, there has been a certain slowing down of the passive and somatic transformations of the organism in favour of the conscious and active metamorphoses of the individual absorbed in society. We find the artificial carrying on the work of the natural; and the transmission of an oral or written culture being superimposed on genetic forms of heredity (chromosomes). Without denying the possibility or even probability of a certain prolongation in our limbs, and still more in our nervous system, of the orthogenetic processes of the past, I am inclined to think that their influence, hardly appreciable since the emergence of Homo sapiens, is destined to dwindle still further. As thought regulated by a sort of quantum law, the energies of life seem unable to spread in one region or take on a new form except at the expense of a lowering elsewhere. Since man’s arrival, the evolutionary pressure seems to have dropped in all the non-human branches of the tree of life. And now that man has become an adult and has opened up for himself the field of mental and social transformations, bodies no longer change appreciably; they no longer need to in the human branch; or if they still change, it will only be under our industrious control. It may well be that in its individual capacities and penetration our brain has reached its organic limits. But the movement does not stop there. From west to east, evolution is henceforth occupied elsewhere, in a richer and more complex domain, constructing, with all minds joined together, mind. Beyond all nations and races, the inevitable taking-as-a-whole of mankind has already begun.
We can envisage a world whose constantly increasing ‘leisure’ and heightened interest would find their vital issue in fathoming everything, trying everything, extending everything; a world in which giant telescopes and atom smashers would absorb more money and excite more spontaneous admiration than all the bombs and cannons put together; a world in which, not only for the restricted band of paid research-workers, but also for the man in the street, the day’s ideal would be the wresting of another secret or another force from corpuscles, stars, or organised matter; a world in which, as happens already, one gives one’s life to be and to know, rather than to possess.
Humanity is, if I have not gone astray in these pages, an object of study of unique value to science for two reasons. (i) It represents, individually and socially, the most synthesised state under which the stuff of the universe is available to us. (ii) Correlatively, it is at present the most mobile point of the stuff in course of transformation.
If there is a future for mankind, it can only be imagined in terms of a harmonious conciliation of what is free with what is planned and totalised. Points involved are: the distribution of the resources of the globe; the control of the trek towards unpopulated areas; the optimum use of the powers set free by mechanisation; the physiology of nations and races; geo-economy, geo-politics, geo-demography; the organisation of research developing into a seasoned organisation of the earth. Whether we like it or not, all the signs and all our needs converge in the same direction. We need and are irresistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all physics, all biology and all psychology, a science of human energetics.
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge—the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
Noögenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly. We have pointed to the principal characteristics of that movement: the closer association of the grains of thought; the synthesis of individuals and of nations or races; the need of an autonomous and supreme personal focus to bind elementary personalities together, without deforming them, in an atmosphere of active sympathy. And, once again: all this results from the combined action of two curvatures—the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of mind—in conformity with the law of complexity and consciousness.
The only universe capable of containing the human person is an irreversibly ‘personalising’ universe.
How does he unify it? By partially immersing himself in things, by becoming element, and then, from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the control and leadership of what we now call evolution.
From the threshold of reflection onwards, we are at what is nothing less than a new form of biological existence.
A certain sort of common sense (the same ‘common sense’ which has again and again been corrected beyond all question by physics) tells us that with man biological evolution has reached its ceiling: in reflecting upon itself, life has become stationary. But should we not rather say that it leaps forward?
He refers to the noösphere as a new layer or membrane on the earth’s surface, a ‘thinking layer’ superposed on the living layer of the biosphere and the lifeless layer of inorganic material, the lithosphere.
A sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of the union felt by souls.
If the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.
The manifest property of living matter to form a system in which ‘terms succeed each other experimentally, following constantly increasing degrees of centro-complexity.’
There is no such thing as the ‘energy of despair’ in spite of what is sometimes said. What those words really mean is a paroxysm of hope against hope. All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope.
By virtue of individual and collective human reflection, evolution—overflowing the physico-chemical organisation of bodies—turns back upon itself and thereby reinforces itself with a new organising power vastly concentric to the first—the cognitive organisation of the universe. To think ‘the world’ (as physics is beginning to realise) is not merely to register it but to cofer upon it a form of unity it would otherwise (i.e. without being thought) be without.
Human history develops between two points of reflection, the one inferior and individual, the other superior and collective.
Nothing could stop humanity in its advance to social unification, towards the development of machinery and automation (liberators of the spirit), towards ‘trying all’ and ‘thinking all’ right to the very end.