classes ::: The_Future_of_Man, Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin, Christianity, Science, chapter,
children :::
branches :::
see also :::

Instances, Classes, See Also, Object in Names
Definitions, . Quotes . - . Chapters .


object:1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter



CHAPTER 2

SOCIAL HEREDITY
AND PROGRESS

Notes on the Hum ww -Christian Value
of Education



1. Education and Life

TO the eye of Physical Science, one of the most
remarkable characteristics of Life is its "additive"
quality. Life propagates itself by ceaselessly adding
to itself what it successively acquires — like a mem-
ory as has often been said. Every living being
passes on to his successor the being he himself in-
herited, not merely diversified but accentuated in a
given direction, according to the line to which he
belongs. And all the lines, whatever their nature,
seem in varying degrees and each after its own for-
mula to move a greater or lesser distance in the
general direction of greater spontaneity and con-
sciousness. Something passes, something grows,
through the long chain of living creatures. This is
the great fact, or the great law, whose discovery has
transformed our vision of the Universe during
nearly two centuries.



SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS 17

At what levels and by what mechanisms does this predeter-
mined additivity of characteristics show itself in the living being?

An essential part of the phenomenon must take place at the
moment of reproduction. The wave of life in its substance and
with its particular characteristics is of necessity communicated to
the child in and through the fertilized cell, the issue of the parents.
Fundamentally biological evolution can only be an effect of ger-
minal transmission. That is why the science of Life concentrates
more and more upon the study of cellular heredity.

But a difficulty arises. As we have said, it appears to be the case
that every zoological chain observed over a sufficiently long period
can be seen to modify itself in a given direction (shape of limbs or
teeth, relative development of the brain, etc.), so that certain spe-
cific characteristics are found to have increased throughout the
part of the chain under observation. Something has undoubtedly
been gained, yet it would seem that none of the elements in the
chain, taken separately, has actively contributed to this gain. Al-
though it was accepted without discussion in the early days of
transformism, the question of the germinal transmission to the
children of characteristics acquired by the parents has become one
of those most hotly disputed among geneticists. No irrefutable ev-
idence of any such transmission has yet been found, and there are
now many biologists who flatly deny that it takes place. But this
amounts to saying that the individual links in a biological chain
passively transmit a germ evolved in themselves, without in any
way affecting it by their own activities: the bodies (the "somata")
grow out of this "germen" which is inexplicably endowed with its
own power of evolutionary development; they are its dependents
but incapable of modifying it. It is a highly improbable hypothesis,
having the grave disadvantage that it deprives the individual of all
responsibility in the development of the race or the particular
branch of which he is a part.



18 THE FUTURE OF MAN

For the purpose of examining the additive mechanism of Life
in its vital, active form I propose to look in a direction which the
theorists of heredity seem to have ignored. No complete light has
yet been thrown on the secret processes taking place in the micro-
scopic recesses of the cell. Let us turn instead to a phenomenon
that we can clearly see because it is on our own scale, and note
what happens in the field of education.

Education. The transmission by example of an improvement, an
action, and its reproduction by imitation. We are curiously inclined
to minimize the significance and the import of this function in the
development of life, for a variety of reasons. Education is so wide-
spread a phenomenon, so clearly visible, humble and commonplace,
that there seems to be no reason to look for any mystery in it. More-
over, it appears to be so exclusively associated with the human con-
dition that it is hard to attribute to it any universal biological value.
Finally, it is such a fragile and superficial structure, shedding a hap-
hazard light on our lives, maintaining and propagating itself by grace
of circumstances that are in themselves precarious and changeable:
how can we compare it to those deep, underlying determinisms
which impose an ineluctable course upon the advance of Life?

These various arguments or appearances, confusedly per-
ceived and accepted, undoubtedly divert our attention from the
"educational factor," causing us to dismiss it as an "epiphenome-
non" unworthy of the attention of the natural scientist and the
physicist. Yet there is not one of them that cannot be revised or re-
versed to sustain a precisely opposite thesis.

Education is infinitely commonplace. . . . But what could be
more ordinary than the three dimensions in space, the fall of a
body, the propagation of light, the growth of a plant? What does
the fundamental progress of science consist in, except the discov-
ery of the organic, structural value of what is most general and
everyday in our experience?



SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS 19

Education is a specifically human phenomenon. . . . No doubt,
where it is a question of reasoned education! But we have only to
observe the animal world with minds more open to the ideas of
birth and evolution to perceive, in this as in every case, that the
"human" could not exist if it did not contain, transfigured in terms
of mind, a property common to all animals, of which the begin-
nings are to be detected as they vanish into the past stretching be-
hind us. The dog, the cat or the bird train their young in countless
ways to hunt, to fly or to build a nest. The monkey does much
more. And how are we to explain the remarkable behavior pat-
terns of the beaver, or of insects, except as the outcome of ac-
cumulated and transmitted experiences and discoveries? Such
phenomena become apparent to us only where the creature under
study has attained a sufficient degree of spontaneity, still more if it
lives in a group. But what more is needed to persuade us that, at
least for practical purposes, education is a universal biological
function, coextensive with the totality of the living world?

We may be tempted to add, nevertheless, that education is an
extrinsic mechanism, superposed at one remove on the transmis-
sion of life. But Bergson has pointed out the arbitrary nature of the
dividing line drawn by common sense between the zone of "or-
ganic" determinisms and that of "spontaneity" in the course of
embryogenesis. When the chick pecks its way out of the egg, is it
the "germen" or the "soma" that guides its beak? The same insid-
ious question, perfectly justified in the case of "ontogenesis," arises
again and no less embarrassingly when it comes to the generative
process itself. At what point does the mother cease to engender her
child? Is it when she first feeds it, after giving it birth? Or is it when,
having weaned it, she teaches it to know and hunt its prey? In fact,
and although it operates successively on two different levels (that of
the purely organic functioning of the mother, and that of her con-
scious action applied to another consciousness), what takes place is



20 THE FUTURE OF MAN

one and the same process pursued externally from one end of the
chain to the other. This leads to that; and this is probably capable
of acting upon that. We have spoken of the biologists who reject
the germinal transmission of acquired characteristics. Have they
considered the case of the countless insects which, dying without
having known their progeny, nevertheless transmit behavior pat-
terns to descendants which they never see? If these patterns, as it
seems we must assume, were discovered by spontaneous experi-
ment at a time when, owing to a different arrangement of the sea-
sons, or of lives or metamorphoses, the parents knew and reared
their young, then this in fact means that the results of education fi-
nally entered into the germ itself, endowing it with attributes as
physically predetermined as size or color or any other of the in-
herited characteristics of the species or breed.

So we reach the following conclusion, which seems to me valid.
Far from being an artificial, accidental, or accessory phenomenon
in its relation to living creatures, education is nothing less than an
essential and natural form of biological additivity. In it we can per-
haps catch a glimpse, still in the marginal, conscious state, of indi-
vidual, germinal heredity in process of formation: as though
organic mutation at this stage took the form of a psychic invention
contrived by the parents and transmitted by them. And also — this
is the least that can be said — we see heredity pass through educa-
tion beyond the individual to enter into its collective phase and be-
come social.

The first and most evident outcome of this view of the matter
is the singular extent to which it coordinates and unifies such ideas
as we have been able to arrive at on the subject of life in general.
But it has another advantage which I particularly wish to dwell
upon. It sheds a new light on the importance and dignity of every-
thing that affects the education of Mankind.



SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS 21

2. Education and Mankind

life HAD attained through Man the highest degree of inven-
tive choice in the individual and socialization in the community.
For this double reason the phenomenon of education as it affects
Man possesses a greater amplitude and clarity than in any other
context and calls for more exhaustive study.

Breathing the atmosphere of human education as we do from
the moment of our birth, we have little inclination or time to con-
sider what it represents, either on its own account or in relation to
ourselves. Yet if we pause to look we can find much to make us
marvel. The following experiment is worth making. Let us imagine
ourselves to be divested of everything that we owe to life in human
society. To begin with we must eliminate all the latest modes of
communication (surface, air, radio) devised by science. But we need
to go much further than this. We must cut ourselves off from in-
dustry and agriculture; we must forget our history; we must assume
that even language does not exist. In short, we must get as close as
we can to that almost inconceivable state in which our conscious-
ness, divorced from all human association, stands naked in face of
the Universe. What is then left of our essential self? Have we in
our mind's eye merely shed the garments from our body, or a part
of our very soul? . . . Now let us reverse the process, reclothing
ourselves piece by piece with those layers of education which we
imagined we tried to cast aside. But in doing so let us seek, how-
ever confusedly, to re-create what we can of their history. What im-
measurable toil went into the weaving of each garment, what
endless time, what trial and error, what a coundess multitude of
hands! Thinking of this we may be disposed to say, "It is all an ac-
cessory and very fragile. A single catastrophe, bringing the whole
of that secular edifice down in ruins, could cause Man to revert to



22 THE FUTURE OF MAN

his earliest state, when Thought was first born on earth. 55 Yet how
can we fail to perceive in that patient and continuous amassing of
human acquirements the methods and therefore the very stamp of
Life itself — Life which is irreversible, its inevitability born of the im-
probable, its consistence of fragility.

Let us rather accept the fact: Mankind, as we find it in its pres-
ent state and present functioning, is organically inseparable from
that which has been slowly added to it, and which is propagated
through education. This "additive zone, 55 gradually created and
transmitted by collective experience, is for each of us a sort of ma-
trix, as real in its own way as our mother 5 s womb. It is a true racial
memory, upon which our individual memories draw and through
which they complete themselves. Applied to the particular and sin-
gular instance of the human species, the idea that education is not
merely a "subphenomenon, 55 but an integral part of biological
heredity, derives unquestionable verification from the very coher-
ence which it brings to the whole landscape, and the relief into
which it throws it.

But we must logically go a step further. The additivity of or-
ganic life, as science now tells us, is something quite different from
the superposition of characteristics added to one another like the
layers forming a sedimentary deposit. Life does not merely "snow-
ball 55 ; it behaves more like a tree, which acquires successive rings
according to the particular fashion of its growth, in a directed man-
ner. To accept that education is one of the factors, or better, one of
the forms of the process which we denote by the very generalized
and rather vague term evolution, is therefore to imply that the sum
of knowledge and acquirement retained and transmitted by edu-
cation from one generation to the next constitutes a natural se-
quence of which the direction may be observed.

And this is precisely what happens.

It may seem difficult, at first glance, to distinguish any kind of



SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS 23

order in the jumble of experiments, organizations and theories
whose incessantly growing mass forms the baggage-train of the
human caravan. Purely quantitative progress, the sceptics tell us.
But if we stand back a little, and look at the phenomenon as a
whole, we can see that all is not confusion. For it then becomes ap-
parent that this accumulation of features, bewildering at close
quarters, does in fact outline a face: the face of Mankind gradually
acquiring the knowledge of its birth, its history, its natural envi-
ronment, its external powers, and the secrets of its soul.

"That which takes place in all of us when, as we grow up, we
become aware of our family past, our present responsibilities, our
ambitions and our loves, is nothing but the brief recapitulation of
a far vaster and slower process through which the whole human race
must pass in its growth from infancy to maturity." . . . We have
heard this said many times; but have we pondered it to the point
of realizing the full intensity and extent of its truth? It denotes the
reality of a growth of Mankind through and above the growth of
individual men. . . . No doubt it is true, if we judge by the written
word, that we cannot claim to be more intelligent than our fathers.
But it is undeniable that, thanks to their accumulated efforts, we
have a better understanding than they could possess of the dimen-
sions, the demands, potentialities and hopes; above all of the pro-
found unity of the world within and around us. In the passage of
time a state of collective human consciousness has been progres-
sively evolved which is inherited by each succeeding generation of
conscious individuals, and to which each generation adds some-
thing. Sustained, certainly, by the individual person, but at the
same time embracing and shaping the successive multitude of in-
dividuals, a sort of generalized human personality is visibly in
process of formation upon the earth. It seems that where Man is
concerned the specific function of education is to ensure the con-
tinued development of this personality by transmitting it to the



24 THE FUTURE OF MAN

endlessly changing mass: in other words, to extend and ensure
in collective mankind a consciousness which may already have
reached its limit in the individual. Its fulfillment, in the case of
man, of this specific function is the final proof of the biological na-
ture and value of education, extending to the things of the spirit.



3. Education and Christianity

SINCE these lines are intended for Christian teachers I must
now transpose the ideas I have outlined to the dimensions of the
Christian supernatural. How do these ideas work out, and to what
extent can they be fully developed in this new domain of Creation?

By definition and in essence Christianity is the religion of the
Incarnation: God uniting Himself with the world which He cre-
ated, to unify it and in some sort incorporate it in Himself. To the
worshipper of Christ this act expresses the history of the universe.

But how does it operate, this gradual conquest and assimilation
of Earth by Heaven? In the first place quantitatively, by the addi-
tion to the Mystical Body of an increasing multitude of human
souls, "until the number shall be complete." But also qualitatively,
by the steady growth, within the bosom of the Church, of a cer-
tain Christological perspective. Through the living tradition of a
faith and a mystique the Christian organism diffuses or expresses
in itself an ever more awakened sense of Christ present and active
in the fulfillments of the world. We cannot continue to love Christ
without discovering Him more and more. The maturing of a col-
lective consciousness accompanied by numerical expansion: these
are two aspects inseparably linked in the historical unfolding of the
Incarnation.

And so in Christianity we again come upon that mysterious law
of additivity and social heredity which in every field governs the



SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS 25

processes of Life; while at the same time in this new domain the
fundamental role of education is again manifest, as the human in-
strument of divine instruction. But a new and fascinating prospect
also emerges. As we have said, human endeavor, viewed in its "nat-
ural 55 aspect, is tending toward some sort of collective personality,
through which the individual will acquire in some degree the con-
sciousness of Mankind as a whole. Viewed on the other hand in its
"supernatural 55 aspect this endeavor expresses itself and culminates
in a sort of participation in the divine life, whereby each individual
will find, by conscious union with a Supreme Personal Being, the
consummation of his own personality. Is it conceivable that two
cases bearing so much resemblance can be wholly divorced from
one another? Or are these two trends of collective consciousness,
one toward Christ, the other toward Mankind, simply related
phases, on different levels, of the same event?

To postulate the truth of the second alternative — that is to say,
to accept that in terms of the divine purpose the two impulses are
one — is to define in its essentials, and in all its splendor, the attitude
of Christian humanism.

To the Christian humanist — faithful in this to the most sure
theology of the Incarnation — there is neither separation nor dis-
cordance, but coherent subordination, between the genesis of
Mankind in the World and the genesis of Christ in Mankind
through His Church. The two processes are inevitably linked in
their structure, the second requiring the first as the matter upon
which it descends in order to superanimate it. This view entirely
respects the progressive, and experientially known, concentration
of human thought in an increasingly acute consciousness of its
unitary destiny. But instead of the vague center of convergence en-
visaged as the ultimate end of this process of evolution, the
personal and defined reality of the Word Incarnate, in which
everything acquires consistence, appears and takes its place.



26 THE FUTURE OF MAN

Life for Man. Man for Christ. Christ for God.

And to ensure the psychic continuity, at every phase, of this vast develop-
ment embracing myriads of elements strewn throughout the immensity of time,
there is a single mechanism — education.

All the lines join together, complete themselves and merge.
Everything becomes one whole.

Which brings us to this final summing up, wherein is revealed
the gravity and unity, but also the complexity, of the seemingly
humble task of the Christian educator:

a It is primarily through education that the hereditary bio-
logical process, which from the beginning has caused the world to
rise to ever higher zones of consciousness, is furthered in a reflec-
tive form and in its social dimensions. The educator, as an instru-
ment of Creation, should derive respect and ardor for his efforts
from a profound, communicative sense of the developments al-
ready achieved or awaited by Nature. Every lesson he gives should
express love for, and cause to be loved, all that is most irresistible
and definitive in the conquests of Life.

b It is through education, by the progressive spread of com-
mon viewpoints and attitudes, that the slow convergence of minds
and hearts is proceeding, without which there seems to be no out-
let ahead of us for the impulse of Life. Directly charged with the
task of achieving this unanimity of mankind, the educator,
whether his subject be literature, history, science or philosophy,
must constantly live with it and consciously strive for its realization.
A passionate faith in the purpose and splendor of human aspira-
tions must be the flame that illumines his teaching.

c Finally, it is through the medium of education that there
ensues, directly and indirectly, the gradual incorporation of the



SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS 27

World in the Word Incarnate: indirecdy, in the degree in which the
heart of a collective Mankind increasingly turned inward upon it-
self is made ready for this high transformation; directly to the ex-
tent that the tide of Grace historically released by Jesus Christ is
propagated only by being borne on a living tradition. But the
teacher who seeks to be wholly effective in transmitting these two
influences, the humanizing and the Divine, must be as it were over-
whelmed by the evidence of their inseparable, structural relation.
To have experienced and understood, in order to teach others to
experience and understand, that all human enrichment is but dross
except inasmuch as it becomes the most precious and incorruptible
of all things by adding itself to an immortal center of love: such is
the supreme knowledge and the ultimate lesson to be imparted by
the Christian educator.

These three linked propositions complete a logical structure
whose perfect harmony proclaims its truth.

In the present day human education is spreading its net over
the earth on an unprecedented scale and by means of unprece-
dented methods of expression and diffusion. Never have there
been so many libraries, periodicals, schools, universities, laborato-
ries — or pupils! And it is remarkable that in this magnificent
whole, proportionate in scale to the new age which we are enter-
ing, there is no institution, other than Christianity, that seems ca-
pable of endowing the immense body of things taught with a true
soul. Because he alone has the power to invest human endeavor
and enrichment with positive aspirations and a positive objective,
the Christian teacher alone is in a position to fulfill, both in the
consciousness he employs and the consciousness he transmits, the
total function of the educator.

1938. £tudes, april 1945.



questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or via the comments below
or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers



--- OBJECT INSTANCES [0]


--- PRIMARY CLASS


chapter

--- SEE ALSO


--- SIMILAR TITLES [0]


1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS
select ::: Being, God, injunctions, media, place, powers, subjects,
favorite ::: cwsa, everyday, grade, mcw, memcards (table), project, project 0001, Savitri, the Temple of Sages, three js, whiteboard,
temp ::: consecration, experiments, knowledge, meditation, psychometrics, remember, responsibility, temp, the Bad, the God object, the Good, the most important, the Ring, the source of inspirations, the Stack, the Tarot, the Word, top priority, whiteboard,

--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



--- QUOTES [0 / 0 - 0 / 0] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



KEYS (10k)


NEW FULL DB (2.4M)


*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***


--- IN CHAPTERS (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



0

   1 Science
   1 Christianity






change font "color":
change "background-color":
change "font-family":
change "padding": 115488 site hits