From west to east, from Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo to London, Moscow, and New York, what is dreamed of—the web that is being woven—the bone of contention—among technicians of all sorts, is nothing less than plans for a general re-casting, which will hold good for the whole earth: a ‘new order,’ a ‘new life.’
A whole world of latent instincts is wakening in us—a ‘general’ soul which was only waiting for a body in order to disclose itself.
Whatever the details and internal complexity of the conflict, the general result of all our turmoil is continually to stimulate a little more the collective, dynamic organization of the conscious elements of the earth. What we can now observe is the extension to planetary limits of an order.
In the whole history of life there has never been such an accumulation of organized energy concentrated in so small a volume.
Imagine an observer, established on some star, who, ever since the beginning of the geological periods, could have followed and measured, in the form of some radiation, the global charge and psychic tension of the star that bears us. Here again, is it not plain that our age would mark the ‘peak’ on the chart recorded—the spot where the curve leaps to a stupendous ‘high’? From being first a vague blur, then red, then green, the biosphere would suddenly have become incandescent.
Mankind, taken as a whole, is passing through a maximum, never as yet attained, of unitary organization and living force.
Until recent years a marked dualism, or even a conflict, ranged physics and biology in opposite camps. On the one hand lay the world of matter, on the other the world of life; and science could not contrive to see how one and the same coherent explanation could cover these two fields of experience, each equally objective.
So long as a natural particle (a molecule, for example) contains in its structure no more than a small number (some tens, or some hundreds, or even some thousands) of organized atoms, no external trace can be distinguished of what we call life. If, however, the number of atoms incorporated rises to several tens of millions (as would seem to be the case with the organic ‘viruses’, vegetal animals) then the chemical characteristics develop a fringe of biological properties in the element concerned.
Life appears to us more and more objectively as a specific property of matter that has been taken to an extremely high degree of ordered complexity—or, which comes to the same thing, of complexity centered upon itself. Speaking empirically, it is a combined effect of complication and centration.
If the chemical and vital elements of the universe are spaced out in astronomical and geological duration, they do not present a random pattern of dispersion: they form a natural series in which their order of appearance coincides essentially with their order of complication.
There gradually emerge, with the passage of time, progressively richer forms of association, forms that are in consequence progressively more organically centered—and, concomitantly, more vitalized.
Until now mankind, both economically and psychically, constituted no more than scattered, or at any rate loosely associated, fragments on the surface of the earth. The time seems to have come when these fragments are going to fuse and coalesce under the irresistible pressure of geographical, biological, political, and social determinisms which have reached an accumulation planetary in order: this global operation coinciding with the awakening of a true ‘spirit of the earth,’ which transcends the spirit of the nation which was all we used to know.
A new order of consciousness emerging from a new order of organic complexity: a hyper-synthesis upon itself of mankind.
If we look at the world as a whole from a sufficiently elevated standpoint, it presents, without any possible doubt, the characteristics of a mass of consciousness in motion.
If the universalization of a human current is obtained by coercion which forcibly imposes, or by suppression which eliminates, or by mechanization which de-humanizes, it is not complete; it neither attains its maximum nor achieves equilibrium.
If you wish fully to realize yourselves, beware above all of everything that isolates, that refuses to accept, and that divides. Each along your own line, let your thought and action be “universal,” which is to say “total.” And tomorrow, maybe, you will find to your surprise that all opposition has disappeared and you can “love” one another.