Is the world amorphous in structure, or does it on the contrary show signs of containing within itself a favored axis of evolution?
Life is not an accident in the Material Universe, but the essence of the phenomenon.
Reflection (that is to say, Man) is not an incident in the biological world, but a higher form of life.
The fact that Life is so rarely encountered in the sidereal immensity is precisely because, representing a higher form of cosmic evolution, it can only come into existence in privileged circumstances of time and place.
It is important to insist at the outset on the fundamental point that (despite all contrary appearances and prejudices) the best way of scientifically explaining the World is to make up our minds to regard animate beings not as a fortuitous by-product, but as the characteristic and specific higher aim of the universal phenomenon of Evolution.
The World falls into order; it organizes itself around Life, which is no longer to be regarded as an anomaly but accepted as pointing the direction of its advance (evidence in itself that the axis was well chosen!). And what is more, up to a point its progress becomes measurable: for, as observation shows, it is the nature of Matter, when raised corpuscularly to a very high degree of complexity, to become centered and interiorized—that is to say, to endow itself with Consciousness.
The cosmic tide may at one time have seemed to be immobilized, lost in the vast reservoir of living forms; but through the ages the level of consciousness was steadily rising behind the barrier, until finally, by means of the human brain (the most “centro-complex” organism yet achieved to our knowledge in the universe) there has occurred, at a first ending of time, the breaking of the dykes, followed by what is now in progress, the flooding of Thought over the entire surface of the biosphere.
The “complexity-consciousness” mechanism gains an added impulse, acquiring a new dimension through new procedures. It is no longer simply a matter of cells organized by the hazards of natural selection, but of completed zoological units inventively building themselves into organisms on a planetary scale.
The phenomenon of man, seen in its entirety, appears to flow toward a critical point of maturation.
Viewed from a certain angle, the internal stir of the Cosmos no longer appears disorderly: it takes a given direction following a major axis of movement at the completion of which the phenomenon of man becomes detached as the most advanced form of the largest and most characteristic of cosmic processes.