Life on earth, taken as a whole, reflects, on a gigantic scale, the conditions of the molecular state.
The more we struggle among ourselves to win free, the less we succeed in standing alone. The more, instead, we become involved in one another, and the more we realize, not without anxiety, that a new order—not to say a new being—is striving invincibly to emerge from our reciprocal bondage—animated by a sort of life proper to itself, and tending, formed through it is entirely from our individual consciousnesses, to absorb the latter, without assimilating them, in a blind network of organic forces. This is the collective.
Students of biology are coming to ask themselves whether we may not be in this process the impotent actors and spectators of one of life’s oldest and most characteristic performances: for life, this consists, once an organic type has been produced, in using it simply as a brick to be incorporated in what it then proceeds to construct.
What has attracted less attention in this life of the species is the tendency they all display, once they have attained maturity, to group themselves in various ways in large socialized units: as though, in colonies of polyps or in the fantastically differentiated associations formed by the insects, a sort of super-organism were trying to establish itself beyond the individual.
Looked at from outside, mankind, being now in contact with itself in every direction, is coming close to its ‘setting-point’ or solidification. It is beginning to form but one single bloc.
Consciousness would appear to be a physical property linked simultaneously to the centration and complication of matter upon itself.
Man can never be apprehended in the state of an isolated particle. He is essentially multitude; he is increasing multitude; and above all, thanks to his astonishing power of physical and psychic inter-fertilization, he is organizable multitude.
We are so accustomed to this spectacle of the plurality of thinking molecules that we never dream of finding it astonishing. Nevertheless, may it not have a profound significance? Why, for example, should we not conceive that, in conformity with the whole history of past life, it represents the possibility and contains the potentiality of a further, trans-human, synthesis of organic matter? We habitually look on the human individual as a closed unit, lost in the gregarious throng of other units, equally locked in on themselves. May he not, rather, be the element, not yet impregnated, of a natural whole still in the course of organization?
The very first time we meet it, the idea of a super-human organism seems fantastic. We are so thoroughly used to refusing to admit that anything could exist in nature higher than ourselves!
If the terrestrial grains of thought can still combine among themselves, man is no longer an inexplicable dead end in the cosmic process of noogenesis: in him, and through him, the rise of consciousness is continuing beyond man himself.
Assuming that an ultra-human synthesis is really being produced, then it can only end, from physical and biological necessity, in causing the appearance of a further degree of organization, and therefore of consciousness, and therefore, again, of freedom.
Everything depends on the aptitude we can reasonably assume in mankind for developing among its members an appropriate form of ‘universal love.’
Love, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.
In virtue of his extreme power of loving, combined with his extreme ‘centricity’ (or, which comes to the same thing, his extreme complexity), man, in so far as he actually loves, is the most magnificently synthesizable of all the elements ever constructed by nature.
The appearance of a universal human love would be a sure indication that the totalization of mankind in a super-organism, super-personal in nature, is biologically to be anticipated and can be realized in practice.
A mental revolution which, without our suspecting it, is making us radically different from preceding generations, separated from us by less than two hundred years.
If charity has so far failed to reign upon earth, may not the reason be simply that in order to establish itself it was necessary for the earth first to have become conscious of its spiritual cohesion and convergence? If we are to be able to love one another must we not first effect a change of plane?