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object:1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter



CHAPTER ONE

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE



To push anything back into the past is equivalent to reducing
it to its simplest elements. Traced as far as possible in the direction
of their origins, the last fibres of the human aggregate are lost to
view and are merged in our eyes with the very stuff of the
universe.

As for the stuff of the universe — the ultimate residue of the
ever more advanced analyses of science — I have not cultivated
that direct and familiar contact with it which would enable me to
do it justice, that contact which comes from experiment and not
from reading and makes all the difference. Besides, I know the
danger of trying to construct a lasting edifice with hypotheses
which are only expected to last for a day, even in the minds of
those who originate them.

To a considerable extent, the representation of the atom
accepted at this moment is nothing more than a simple means,
graphic even while subject to revision, enabling the scientist to
put together and to show the non-contradiction of the ever more
various ' effects ' manifested by matter — many of which, more-
over, have still no recognisable prolongation in man.

As I am a naturalist rather than a physicist, obviously I shall
avoid dealing at length with or placing undue reliance upon these
complicated and fragile edifices.

On the other hand, among the variety of overlapping theories,
a certain number of characteristics emerge which are inevitable in
any suggested explanation of the universe. It is of these ' imposed '
factors that it is not unbecoming for a naturalist to speak when
engaged on a general study of the phenomenon of man. In fact,

39



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN



inasmuch as they express the conditions belonging to all natural
change, even biological, he is bound to take them as his point of
departure.



i. ELEMENTAL MATTER

Observed from this special angle, and considered at the outset in
its elemental state (by which I mean at any moment, at any
point, and in any volume), the stuff of tangible things reveals
itself with increasing insistence as radically particulate yet essen-
tially related, and lastly, prodigiously active.

Plurality, unity, energy : the three faces of matter.



A.



Plurality



The profoundly ' atomic ' l character of the universe is visible in
everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts
of the living, and the multitude of stars ; even in the ashes of the
dead. Man has needed neither microscope nor electronic analysis
in order to suspect that he lives surrounded by and resting on dust.
But to count the grains and describe them, all the patient craft of
modern science was necessary. The atoms of Epicurus were mert
and indivisible. And the infinitesimal worlds of Pascal could still
possess their animalcules. Today we have gone far beyond such
instinctive or inspired guesswork bodi in certainty and precision.
The scaling down is unlimited. Like die tiny diatom shells whose
markings, however magnified, change almost indefinitely into
new patterns, so each particle of matter, ever smaller and smaller,
under the physicist's analysis tends to reduce itself into some-
thing yet more finely granulated. And at each new step in
this progressive approach to the infinitely small the whole
configuration of the world is for a moment blurred and then
renewed.
1 [Atomkitf.]

40



THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

When we probe beyond a certain degree of depth and dilution,
the familiar properties of our bodies— light, colour, warmth,
impenetrability, etc. — lose their meaning.

Indeed our sensory experience turns out to be a floating con-
densation on a swarm of the undefinable. Bewildering in its
multiplicity and its minuteness, the substratum of the tangible
universe is in an unending state of disintegration as it goes down-
ward.



B. Unity

On the other hand the more we split and pulverise matter
artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

In its most imperfect form, but the simplest to imagine, this
unity reveals itself in the astonishing similarity of the elements
met with. Molecules, atoms, electrons— whatever the name,
whatever the scale — these minute units (at any rate when viewed
from our distance) manifest a perfect identity of mass and of
behaviour. In their dimensions and actions they seem astonish-
ingly calibrated — and monotonous. It is almost as if all that
surface play which charms our lives tends to disappear at deeper
levels. It is almost as if the stuff of which all stuff is made were
reducible in the end to some simple and unique kind of substance.

Thus the unity of homogeneity. To the cosmic corpuscles we
should find it natural to attribute an individual radius of action
as limited as their dimensions. We find, on the contrary, that
each of them can only be defined by virtue of its influence on all
around it. Whatever space we suppose it to be in, each cosmic
element radiates in it and entirely fills it. However narrowly the
' heart ' of an atom may be circumscribed, its realm is co-extensive,
at least potentially, with that of every other atom. This strange
property we will come across again, even in the human molecule.

We add : collective unity. The innumerable foci which share
a given volume of matter are not therefore independent of each
other. Something holds them together. Par from behaving as a

41



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

mere inert receptacle, the space filled by their multitude operates
upon it like an active centre of direction and transmission in which
their plurality is organised. We do not get what we call matter
as a result of the simple aggregation and juxtaposition of atoms.
For that, a mysterious identity must absorb and cement them, an
influence at which our mind rebels in bewilderment at first but
which in the end it must perforce accept.

We mean the sphere above the centres and enveloping them.

Throughout these pages, in each new phase of anthropo-
genesis, we shall find ourselves faced by the unimaginable reality
of collective bonds, and we shall have to struggle with them
without ceasing until we succeed in recognising and defining their
true nature. Here in the beginning it is sufficient to include them
all under the empirical name given by science to their common
initial principle, namely energy.



c. Energy



Under this name, which conveys the experience of effort with
which we arc familiar in ourselves, physics has introduced die
precise formulation of a capacity for action or, more exactly, for
interaction. Energy is the measure of that which passes from one
atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying
power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become
enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression
of structure.

From the aspect of energy, renewed by radio-active pheno-
mena, material corpuscles may now be treated as transient
reservoirs of concentrated power. Though never found in a state
of purity, but always more or less granulated (even in light)
energy nowadays represents for science the most primitive form
of universal stuff. Hence we find our minds instinctively tending
to represent energy as a kind of homogeneous, primordial flux
in which all that has shape in the world is but a series of fleeting
' vortices '. From this point of view, the universe would find its

42



THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

stability and final unity at the end of its decomposition. It would be
held together from below.

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of
physics. But let us not become bound and fettered to the per-
spective of final equilibrium that they seem to suggest. A more
complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us,
little by little, to turn it upside down ; in other words, to discover
that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of
complexity, from above.



2. TOTAL MATTER

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. Considered in its
physical, concrete reality, the stuff of the universe cannot divide
itself but, as a kind of gigantic ' atom ', it forms in its totality
(apart from thought on which it is centred and concentrated at
the other end) the only real indivisible. The history of conscious-
ness and its place in the world remain incomprehensible to anyone
who has not seen first of all that the cosmos in which man finds
himself caught up constitutes, by reason of the unimpeachable
wholeness of its whole, a system, a Mum and a quantum : a system
by its plurality, a totum by its unity, a quantum by its energy ;
all three within a boundless contour.
Let us try to make this clear.



A. The System

The existence of ' system ' in the world is at once obvious to every
observer of nature, no matter whom.

The arrangement of the parts of the universe has always been

43



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

a source of amazement to men. But this disposition proves itself
more and more astonishing as, every day, our science is able to
make a more precise and penetrating study of the facts. 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.

It is impossible to cut into this network, to isolate a portion
without it becoming frayed and unravelled at all its edges.

All around us, as far as the eye can see, the universe holds
together, and only one way of considering it is really possible,
that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece.



b. The Totum



Now, if we consider this whole more attentively, we quickly see
that it is something quite other than a mere entanglement of
articulated inter-connections. If one says fabric or network, one
thinks of a homogeneous plexus of similar units which it may
indeed be impossible to section, but of which it is sufficient to
have recognised the basic unit and to have defined the law to be
able to understand the whole by repetition : a crystal or arabesque
whose laws are valid for whatever space it fills, but which is
wholly contained in a single mesh.

Between such a structure and the structure of matter there is
nothing in common.

In its different orders of magnitude, matter never repeats its
different combinations. For expedience and simplicity we some-
times like to imagine the world as being a series of planetary
systems superimposed, the one on the other, and grading from
the infinitely small to the infinitely big : Pascal's two abysses

44



THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

once again. This is only an illusion. The envelopes composing
matter are thoroughly heterogeneous the one with regard to the
other. First we have a vague circle of electrons and other inferior
units ; then a better-defined circle of simple bodies in which the
elements are distributed as periodic functions of the atom of
hydrogen ; farther on another circle, of inexhaustible molecular
combinations ; and lastly, jumping or recoiling from the infini-
tesimal to the infinite, a circle of stars and galaxies. These multiple
zones of the cosmos envelop without imitating each other in such
a way that we cannot pass from one to another by a simple
change of coefficients. Here is no repetition of the same theme on
a different scale. The order and the design do not appear except
in the whole. The mesh of the universe is the universe itself.

Thus it is not enough merely to assert that matter forms a
block or whole.

The stuff of the universe, woven in a single piece according
to one and the same system, 1 but never repeating itself from one
point to another, represents a single figure. Structurally, it forms
a Whole.



c. The Quantum



Now, if the natural unity of concrete space indeed coincides
with the totality of space itself, we must try to re-define energy
with reference to space as a whole.

This leads us to two conclusions.

The first is that the radius of action proper to each cosmic
element must be prolonged in theory to the utmost limits of the
world itself. As we said above, since the atom is naturally
co-extensive with the whole of the space in which it is situated —
and since, on the other hand, we have just seen that a universal
space is the only space there is — we are bound to admit that this
immensity represents the sphere of action common to all atoms.
The volume of each of them is the volume of the universe. The
1 Which we shall call later on ' the Law of Consciousness and Complexity '.

45



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

atom is no longer the microscopic, closed world wc may have
imagined to ourselves. It is the infinitesimal centre of the world

itself.

Now, on the other hand, let us turn our attention to the
entirety of the infinitesimal centres which share the universal
sphere among themselves. Indefinite though their number may
be, they constitute in their multitude a group which has precise
effects. For the whole, because it exists, must express itself in a
global capacity for action of which we find the partial resultant in
each one of us. Thus we find ourselves led on to envisage and
conceive a dynamic standard of the world.

True the world lias apparently limitless contours. To use
varying metaphors: it behaves to our senses, either as a pro-
gressively attenuated environment which vanishes without a
limital surface in an infinitely decreasing gradation, or as a
curved and closed space within which all the lines of our experi-
ence turn back upon themselves, in which case matter only
appears boundless to us because we cannot emerge from it.

This is no reason for refusing it a quantum of energy, which
the physicists, incidentally, already think they are in a position to
measure.

But this quantum only takes on its full significance when we
try to define it with regard to a concrete natural movement—
that is to say, in duration.



I. THE EVOLUTION OF MATTER

Physics was born, in the last century, under the double sign of
fixity and geometry. Its ideal, in its youth, was to find a mathe-
matical explanation of a world imagined as a system of stable
elements in a closed equilibrium. Then, following all science of
the real, it was inevitably drawn by its own progress into becom-
ing a history. Today, positive knowledge of things is identified
with the study of their development. Farther on, in the chapter
on Thought, we shall have to describe and interpret the vital

46



THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

revolution in human consciousness brought about by the quite
modern discovery of duration. Here we need only ask ourselves
how our views about matter are enlarged by the introduction of
this new dimension.

In essence, the change wrought in our experience by the
appearance of what we shall soon call space-time is this, that
everything that up to then we regarded and treated as points in
our cosmological constructions became instantaneous sections of
indefinite temporal fibres. To our opened eyes each element
of things is henceforth extended backwards (and tends to be con-
tinued forwards) as far as the eye can see in such a way that the
entire spatial immensity is no more than a section ' at the time t '
of a trunk whose roots plunge down into the abyss of an un-
fathomable past, and whose branches rise up somewhere to a
future that, at first sight, has no limit. In tliis new perspective the
world appears like a mass in process of transformation. The
universal totum and quantum tend to express and define them-
selves in cosmogenesis. What at this moment are the appearance
(qualitative) assumed from the point of view of the physicists and
the rules followed (quantitative) by this evolution of matter ?



A. The Appearance

As seen in its central portion, which is the most distinct, the
evolution of matter, in current theory, comes back to the gradual
building up by growing complication of the various elements
recognised by physical chemistry. To begin with, at the very
bottom there is a still unresolved simplicity, luminous in nature
and not to be defined in terms of figures. Then, suddenly( ?)'



1 Some years ago this first birth of the corpuscles was imagined rather as a
sudden condensation (as in a saturated environment) of a primordial substance
or stuff", diffused throughout limitless space. Nowadays, for various convergent
reasons, notably Relativity combined with the centrifugal retreat of the
galaxies, physicists prefer to turn to the idea of an explosion pulverising a
primitive quasi-atom within which space-time would be strangulated (in a

47



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

came a swarming of elementary corpuscles, both positive and
negative (protons, neutrons, electrons, photons) : the list in-
creases incessantly. Then the harmonic series of simple bodies,
strung out from hydrogen to uranium on the notes of the atomic
scale. Next follows the immense variety of compound bodies in
which the molecular weights go on increasing up to a certain
critical value above which, as we shall see, we pass on to life.
There is not one term in this long series but must be regarded,
from sound experimental proofs, as being composed of nuclei and
electrons. 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. In its
own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law
of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again,
the law of ' complexification V

I say in its own way because, at the stage of the atom, we are
still ignorant of many points in the history of the world.

First of all, must all the elements mount each successive rung
of the ladder from the most simple to the most complicated by a
kind of onto- or phylo-genesis in order to raise themselves in the
series of simple bodies ? Or do the atomic numbers only represent
a rhythmic series of states of equilibrium, sets of pigeon-holes, as
it were, into which nuclei and electrons fall in rough assemblages ?
Moreover, in the one instance as in the other, must we regard the
various combinations of nuclei as being equally possible at any
one time ? Or, on the other hand, must we suppose that on the
whole, statistically, the heavy atoms only appear in a determinate
order, after the lighter ones ?

1 [Complexification in the original: taken over here as the substantival form
of the very rare English verb ' complexify ' — to make complex.]



sort of natural absolute zero) at only some milliards of yean behind us. For
understanding the following pages, the two hypotheses arc equivalent, in the
sense that they put us, the one just as much as the other, in the midst of a
corpuscular multitude from which we cannot escape in any direction; neither
round about nor behind — but possibly forwards (cf. Part 4, chapter 2) through
a singular point of interiorisation.

48



THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

It does not appear that science is at present able to give
definitive answers to these questions, or to others like them. At
the present time we are less well informed about the ascending
evolution of atoms (I do not say ' the disintegration ') than we
are about the pre-living and living molecules. It is none the
less true, and this is the only point of real importance that concerns
us here, that from its most distant formulations matter reveals
itself to us in a state of genesis or becoming — this genesis allowing
us to distinguish two of the aspects most characteristic of it in its
subsequent stages. First of all, to begin with a critical phase, that
of granulation, which abruptly and once and for all gave birth to
the constituents of the atom and perhaps to the atom itself. Next,
at least from the molecular level, of going on additively by a
process of growing complexity.

Everything docs not happen continuously at any one moment
in the universe. Neither does everything happen everywhere
in it.

So we may summarise in a few lines the ideas about the trans-
formations of matter accepted by science today : but only by con-
sidering the latter in their temporal succession, and without as yet
putting them anywhere within the cosmic expanse. Historically,
the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever
more organised forms of matter. But where, then, do these meta-
morphoses take place, beginning, let us say, with the framework
of molecules ? Is it indifferently at any point in space ? Not at all,
as we all know, but only in the heart and on the surface of the
stars. From having considered the infinitely small elements we
are abruptly compelled to raise our eyes to infinitely great
sidereal masses.

The sidereal masses . . . Our science is at the same time troubled
and fascinated by these colossal unities, which in some ways
behave like atoms, but whose constitution baffles us by its
enormous and — in appearance only ? — irregular complexity.
Perhaps the day will come when some arrangement or periodicity
will become apparent in the stellar distribution both as regards
their composition and their position. Do not a ' stratigraphy '

49



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

and a ' chemistry ' of the heavens inevitably extend the story of
the atoms ?

We have not to entangle ourselves in these still misty per-
spectives. No matter how fascinating they may be, they surround
man rather than lead up to him. On the other hand, because of
its consequences even up to the genesis of the intellect, we must
notice and record the definite connection which, genetically,
associates the atom with the star. For a long time yet physics may
hesitate over the structure to be assigned to the astral immensities.
In the meantime one thing is certain and is enough to guide our
steps along the ways of anthropogenesis. That is that the making
of greater material complexes can only take place under cover of a
previous concentration of the stufl of the universe in nebulae and
suns. Whatever the overall figure of the worlds may be, the
chemical function ot each one of them already has a defuiable
meaning for us. The stars are laboratories in which the evolution
of matter proceeds in the direction ol large molecules, and that
according to determinate quantitative rules which we must now
discuss.

B. The Numerical Laws



What ancient thought half perceived and imagined as a natural
harmony of numbers, modern science has grasped and realised
in the precision of formulae dependent on measurement. Indeed,
we owe our knowledge of the macro-structure and micro-
structure of the universe far more to increasingly accurate
measurements than to direct observations. And, again, it is ever
bolder measurements that have revealed to us the calculable
conditions to which every transformation of matter is subject
according to the force it calls into play.

This is not the place for me to embark on a critical discussion
of the laws of energy. That part of them that is indispensable and
accessible to every world-historian may be simply summarised.
Considered from this biological aspect, broadly speaking, they
may be reduced to the two following principles :

50



THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSB

First Principle. During changes of a physico-chemical type we
do not detect any measurable emergence of new energy.

Every synthesis costs something. That is a fundamental con-
dition of things which persists, as we know, even into the spiritual
zones of being. In every domain, the achievement of progress
requires an excess of effort and therefore of force. Now whence
does this increase come ?

I11 the abstract, one might assume an internal growth of the
world's resources, an absolute increase in mechanical wealth
corresponding to the expanding needs of evolution ; but, in fact,
things seem to happen otherwise. In no case does the energy
required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh
capital, but by expenditure. What is gained on one side is lost on
the other. Nothing is constructed except at the price of an
equivalent destruction.

Experimentally and at first sight, when we consider the
universe in its mechanical functions, it does not reveal itself to
us as an open quantum capable of containing an ever greater
reality within its embrace, but as a closed quantum, within which
nothing progresses except by exchange of that which was given
in the beginning.

That is a first appearance.

Second Principle. In every physico-chemical change, adds
thermodynamics, a fraction of the available energy is irrecover-
ably ' entropised ', lost, that is to say, in the form of heat. Doubt-
less it is possible to retain this degraded fraction symbolically in
equations, so as to express that in the operations of matter nothing
is lost any more than anything is created, but that is merely a
mathematical trick. As a matter of fact, from the real evolutionary
standpoint, something is finally burned in the course of every
synthesis in order to pay for that synthesis. The more the energy-
quantum of the world comes into play, the more it is consumed.
Within the scope of our experience, the material concrete
universe seems to be unable to continue on its way indefinitely in
a closed cycle, but traces out irreversibly a curve of obviously
limited development. And thus it is that this universe differ-

5i



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN



entiates itself from purely abstract magnitudes and places itself
among the realities which are born, which grow, and which die.
From time it passes into duration ; and finally escapes from
geometry dramatically to become, in its totality as in its parts, an
object of history. 1

Let us translate into images the natural significance of these
two principles of the Conservation and Dissipation of Energy.

We said above that qualitatively the evolution of matter
reveals itself to us, hie et nunc, as a process during which the con-
stituents of the atom are inter-combined and ultra-condensed.
Quantitatively, this transformation now appears to us as a definite,
but costly, operation in which an original impetus slowly becomes
exhausted. Laboriously, step by step, the atomic and molecular
structures become higher and more complex, but the upward
force is lost on the way. Moreover, the same wearing away that
is gradually consuming the cosmos in its totality is at work witlun
the terms of the synthesis, and the higher the terms the quicker
this action takes place. Little by little, the improbable combinations
that they represent become broken down again into more simple
components, which fall back and are disaggregated in the shape-
lessness of probable distributions.

A rocket rising in the wake of time's arrow, that only bursts
to be extinguished ; an eddy rising on the bosom of a descending
current — such then must be our picture of the world.

So says science : and I believe in science : but up to now has
science ever troubled to look at the world other than from
without ?



1 |cf. concluding sections of R. G. Collingwood : Idea oj Nature (O.U.P.
IS>44).|

52



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