object:1.02 - The Vision of the Past
book class:Let Me Explain
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
2. The Vision of die Past
This second chapter will be an attempt to show that the study of the
earth's past is sufficient in itself to oblige us to accept not only the idea
of evolution but a clear pattern of a rise of consciousness throughout the
ages: an ascent of which man now represents the culminating point.
. But if we are to make this journey into the past, we must allow our-
selves to be permeated by this 'sense of depth', referred to earlier, so
that we may discover the new real dimension of things which the dis-
covery of time obliges us to accept.
I. THE DISCOVERY OF TIME
To understand the spiritual events which are so convulsing
the age we live in we need to be constandy looking back (I
shall repeat this) to their common oiigin - the discovery of
Time.
This does not mean that men had to wait till the nineteenth
century before seeing how events, grouped in long series,
were absorbed into the past. They talked of Time long be-
fore our day, and even measured it, so far as their instru-
ments permitted, as we do now. But Time remained for
them a homogeneous quantity, capable of being divided into
parts. The course of centuries lying ahead and behind us
could be conceived of in theory as abrupdy stopping or
beginning at a given moment, the real and total duration of
the Universe being supposed not to exceed a few thousand
years. On the other hand, it appeared that within those few
millennia any object could be arbitrarily displaced and re-
moved to another point without undergoing any change in
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Let Me Explain
its environment or in itself. Socrates could have been born
in the place of Descartes, and vice versa. Temporally (no
less than spatially) human beings were regarded as inter-
changeable.
This, broadly, is what was accepted by the greatest minds
up to and including Pascal.
But since then, under the influence, unconcerted but con-
vergent, of the natural, historical and physical sciences, an
entirely new concept has almost imperceptibly shaped itself
in our minds.
We have in the first place realized that every constituent
element of the world (whether a being or a phenomenon) has
of necessity emerged from that which preceded it - so much
so that it is as physically impossible for us to conceive of a
thing in Time without 'something before it' as it would be
to imagine the same thing in Space without 'something be-
side it\ In this sense every particle of reality, instead of
constituting an approximate point in itself, extends from the
previous fragment to the next in an indivisible thread run-
ning back into infinity.
Secondly we have found that the threads or chains of
elements thus formed are not homogeneous over their ex-
tent, but that each represents a naturally ordered series in
which the links can no more be exchanged than can the
successive states of infancy, adolescence, maturity and seni-
lity in our own lives.
Finally, we have gradually come to understand that no
elemental thread in the Universe is wholly independent in
its growth of its neighbouring threads. Each forms part of a
sheaf; and the sheaf in turn represents a higher order of
thread in a still larger sheaf- and so on indefinitely.
This is the organic whole of which today we find our-
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Phenomenology
selves to be a part, without being able to escape from it.
Whereas for the last two centuries our study of science, his-
tory and philosophy has appeared to be a matter of specula-
tion, imagination and hypothesis, we can now see that in
fact, in countless subtle ways, the concept of Evolution has
been weaving its web around us. We believed that we did
not change; but now, like newborn infants whose eyes are
opening to the light, we are becoming aware of a world in
which neo-Time is endowing the totality of our knowledge
and beliefs with a new structure and a new direction. (F.M.,
pp. 83-5.)
For our age, to have become conscious of evolution means
something very different from and much more than having
discovered one further fact, however massive and important
that fact may be. It means (as happens with a child when he
acquires the sense of perspective) that we have become alive
to a new dimension. The idea of evolution: not, as is some-
times still said, a mere hypothesis, but a condition of all
experience - or again, if you prefer the expression, the univer-
sal curve to which all our present and future ways of
constructing the universe must conform, if they are to be
scientifically valid or even thinkable. (S.C., p. 193.)
This is something we must understand once and for all:
for us and for our descendants, there is henceforth a final and
permanent change in psychological times and dimensions.
(A.E. (Oeuvres VII), p. 264.)
II. THE RISE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The meticulous work accomplished in the past hundred
years by the collectors of fossils, the results of which they
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Let Me Explain
have patiently recorded in ipnumerable papers and in bar-
barous language, perfectly incomprehensible to non-initi-
ates, the paraphernalia of systematics and the clutter on the
museum shelves, all this has made a contribution of the ut-
most importance to the World's thinking. It has added to
the sum of human knowledge an item of extraordinary
interest - a segment of the past extending over some three hun-
dred million years. (F.M., p. 63 . )
4 When observed through a sufficient depth of time (mil-
lions of years) Life can be seen to move. Not only does it
move but it advances in a definite direction. And not only
does it advance, but in observing its progress we can dis-
cern the process or practical mechanism whereby it does so/
These are three propositions which may be briefly de-
veloped as follows :
a. Life moves. This calls for no demonstration. Everyone
in these days knows how greatly all living forms have
changed if we compare two moments in the earth's history
sufficiently separated in time. In any period of ten million
years Life practically grows a new skin.
b. In a definite direction. This is the crucial point which has
to be clearly understood. While accepting the undeniable
fact of a general transformation of Life in the course of time,
many biologists still maintain that this takes place without
following any defined course, in any direction and at ran-
dom. This contention, disastrous to any idea of progress, is
refuted, in my view, by the tremendous fact of the continu-
ing 'cerebralization' of living creatures. Research shows that
from the lowest to the highest level of the organic world
there is a persistent and clearly defined thrust of animal
forms towards species with more sensitive and elaborate
nervous systems. A growing 'innervation' and 'cephaliza-
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Phenomenology
tion' of organisms: the working of this law is visible in every
living group known to us, the smallest no less than the lar-
gest. We can follow it in insects as in vertebrates; and among
the vertebrates we can follow it from class to class, from
order to order, and from family to family. There is an am-
phibian phase of the brain, a reptilian phase, a mammalian
phase. In the mammals we see the brain grow as time passes
and become more complex among the ungulates, the car-
nivores and above all the primates. So much so that one could
draw a steadily rising Curve of Life taking Time as one co-
ordinate and, as the other, the quantity (and quality) of
nervous tissue existing on earth at each geological stage.
What else can this mean except that, as shown by the de-
velopment of nervous systems, there is a continual heighten-
ing, a rising tide of consciousness which visibly manifests
itself on our planet in the course of the ages?
c. We come to the third point. What is the underlying
process whose existence we can perceive in this continual
heightening of consciousness, as revealed by the organic
evolution of the nervous system and the brain? Let us look
more closely in the light of the latest data supplied by the
combined ingenuity of an army of research workers. As we
are beginning to realize, there are probably tens of thou-
sands of atoms grouped in a single virus molecule. There are
certainly tens of thousands of molecules grouped in a single
cell. There are millions of cells in a single brain. There are
millions of brains in a single ant-hill. . . .
What does this atomism signify except that the stuff of the
Cosmos, governed at its lower end (as we already knew) by
forces of dispersal which slowly cause it to dissolve into
atoms, now shows itself to be subjected, at the other end, to
an extraordinary power of enforced coalescence, of which
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Let Me Explain
the outcome is the emergence, in step with this, of an ever-
increasing amount of spiritual energy in matter that is ever
more powerfully synthesized? Let me note that there is
nothing metaphysical in this. I am not seeking to define either
Spirit or Matter. I am simply saying, without leaving the
physical field, that the greatest discovery made in this cen-
tury is probably the realization that the passage of Time may
best be measured by the gradual gathering of Matter in
superposed groups, of which the arrangement, ever richer
and more centred, is surrounded by an ever more luminous
fringe of liberty and interiority. The phenomenon of grow-
ing consciousness on earth, in short, is directly due to the
increasingly advanced organization of more and more com-
plicated elements, successively created by the working of
chemistry and of Life. At the present time I can see no more
satisfactory solution of the enigma presented to us by the
physical progress of the Universe. (F. M., pp. 64-6.)
III. THE PLACE OF MAN IN THE FOREFRONT OF LIFE
In what I have said thus far I have been looking at Life in
general, in its entirety. We come now to the particular case
which interests us most - the problem of Man.
The existence of an ascendant movement in the Universe
has been revealed to us by the study of palaeontology. Where
is Man to be situated in this line of progress?
The answer is clear. If, as I maintain, the movement of the
cosmos towards the highest degree of consciousness is not an
optical illusion, but represents the essence of biological evolu-
tion, then, in the curve traced by Life, Man is unquestion-
ably situated at the topmost point; and it is he, by his
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Phenomenology
emergence and existence, who finally proves the reality of the
trajectory and defines it - 'the dot on the i\ . . .
Indeed, within the field accessible to our experience, does
not the birth of Thought stand out as a critical point through
which all the striving of previous ages passes and is consum-
mated - the critical point traversed by consciousness, when,
by force of concentration, it ends by reflecting upon itself?
(F.M., p. 67.)
This critical point of 'reflection' will be defined more exactly at the
beginning of the next chapter: 'What is the Phenomenon of Man?'
The fundamental line of growth - one becomes progressively
less able to avoid this almost direct evidence - is the advance
of organic beings towards an increase of spontaneity and
consciousness. The kind of peak - it would be childish to
deny this out of fear of some kind of 'anthropomorphism* -
is, at this present moment, man. Man, no doubt, can be de-
fined on the non-relief map of systematics as a family of
primates recognizable by certain details of skull, pelvis and
limbs. But if we wish to place him in a truly natural picture
of the world, which takes into account the whole evolution
of life, his principal definition must be made by his property
of 'taking the lead' at this moment in the movement drawing
organic beings towards greater possibilities of knowledge and
action. Similarly, before man's arrival, the entire line of
higher primates already occupied a place apart in nature.
But man, by his arrival, swept them aside, making so decisive
an advance over everything around him that he is now
alone in the lead. (V.P., pp. 165-6.)
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