object:1.03 - THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter
CHAPTER THREE
THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES
Somb thousands of millions of years ago, not, it would appear,
by a regular process of astral evolution, but as the result of some
unbelievable accident (a brush with another star ? an internal
upheaval ?) a fragment of matter composed of particularly stable
atoms was detached from the surface of the sun. Without
breaking the bonds attaching it to the rest, and just at the right
distance from the mother-star to receive a moderate radiation,
this fragment began to condense, to roll itself up, to take shape. 1
Containing within its globe and orbit the future of man, another
heavenly body— a planet this time — had been born.
So far our eyes have been straying over the unlimited layers
in which the stuff of the universe is deployed.
From now on let us concentrate our attention on this diminu-
tive, obscure, but fascinating object which had just appeared. It
is the only place in the world in which we are so far able to study
the evolution of matter in its ultimate phases, and as far as our-
selves.
Let us have a look at the earth in its early stages, so fresh yet
charged with latent powers, as it balances in the chasms of the
past.
1 Once again astronomers seem to be returning to a more Laplaccan con-
cept of" the birth of planets by the effect of knots and bulges in the cloud of
cosmic dust originally floating round each star.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
i. THE WITHOUT
What arouses the physicist's interest in this globe — new-born,
it would seem, by a stroke of chance in the cosmic mass — is the
presence of composite chemical bodies not to be observed any-
. where else. 1 At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars,
matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple
bodies exist on these incandescent stars. On the earth this sim-
plicity of the elements still obtains at the periphery, in the more
or less ionised gases of the atmosphere and the stratosphere and,
probably, far below, in the metals of the ' barysphcre '. But
between these two extremes comes a long series of complex
substances, harboured and produced only by stars that have 'gone
out '. Arranged in successive zones, they demonstrate from the
start the powers of synthesis contained in the universe. First the
siliceous zone, preparing the solid crust of the planet. Next
the zone of water and carbonic acid, enclosing the silicates in an
unstable, mobile and penetrating envelope.
In other words we have the barysphere, lithosphere, hydro-
sphere, atmosphere and stratosphere.
This fundamental composition may have varied and become
elaborated in detail, but by and large it can be said to have estab-
lished itself from the beginning. And it is from it that geo-
chemistry develops progressively in two different directions.
A. The Crystallising World
In one direction, much the more common, terrestrial energy has
tended from the outset to be given off and liberated. Silicates,
water, carbon dioxide — these essential oxides were formed by
burning up and neutralising (alone or in association with other
simple bodies) the affinities of their elements. Carrying the
1 Except, chough very fugitively, in the atmosphere of the planets nearest
to our own.
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THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES
scheme progressively further, the result is the rich variety of the
' mineral world '.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world
than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely
analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs
in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transforma-
tion of a mineral species.
But it is a world relatively poor in compounds, because of the
narrow limit to the internal architecture of its elements. Accord-
ing to latest estimates, we have found only a few hundred silicates
in nature.
Looking at them ' biologically ' we may say it is the character-
istic of minerals (as of so many other organisms that have become
incurably fixed) to have chosen a road which closed them pre-
maturely in upon themselves. By their innate structure the mole-
cules are unfitted for growth. To develop beyond a certain size
they have in a way to get out of themselves, to have recourse to
a trick of purely external association, whereby the atoms are
linked together without true combination or union. Sometimes
we find them in strings as in jade, sometimes in planes as in mica,
and sometimes in a solid quincunx as in garnet.
In this way, by simple juxtaposition of atoms or relatively
simple atomic groups in geometrical patterns, regular aggregates
may be produced whose level of composition is often very high,
but they correspond to no properly centred units ; they are an
indefinitely extended mosaic of small elements — such as we know
to be the structure of a crystal, which, thanks to X-rays, can now
be photographed. And such is the organisation, simple and stable,
which the condensed matter around us has by and large perforce
adopted from its origins.
Considered in the mass, the earth is veiled in geometry as far
back as we can see. It crystallises.
But not completely.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
b. The Polymerising World
In the course of and by virtue of the initial advance of the elements
on earth towards the crystalline state, energy was constandy
released and liberated (just as, today, it is released by mankind as
a result of machinery). This was constantly augmented by energy
furnished by the atomic decomposition of radio-active substances
and by that given off by solar rays. Where could this surplus
energy, available on the surface of the earth in its early stages, go
to ? Was it merely to be lost around the globe in obscure emana-
tions ?
Another much more probable hypothesis occurs to us when
we look at the world today. When it became too weak to escape
in incandescence, the free energy of the new-born eartli became
capable of reacting on itself in a work of synthesis. Thus, as
today, it passed with the absorption of heat into building up
certain carbonates, hydrates or hydrites, and nitrates like those
which astonish us by their power to increase indefinitely the
complexity and instability of their elements. This is the realm of
polymerisation* in which die particles ' concatenate ', group
themselves and exchange positions, as in crystals, in a theoretically
endless network. Only, this time it is molecules with molecules in
such a way as to form on each occasion [by closed or at all events limited
combination) an ever larger and more complex molecule.
This world of organic compounds ' is ours. We live among
diem and are made of them. So intimately do we see it as con-
nected with the phenomena of Life that we have got into the habit
of considering it only in direct association with life already con-
stituted. Moreover, despite its incredible wealth of forms, which
far surpasses the variety of mineral compounds, it concerns such
a tiny part of the substance of the earth that we are instinctively
1 1 crust I shall be forgiven (as later in the case or " orthogenesis ') tor using
this term in so generalised a sense, i.e. to include (as well as thesenct polymerisa-
tion of the chemists) the entire process of ' additive complexiricatioii ' pro-
ducing large molecules.
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THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES
inclined to relegate it to a minor position of geo-chemistry—
like the ammonia and oxides that surround the lightning's
flash.
If we wish later to fix the place of man in nature, it seems to
me essential to restore to this phenomenon its true physiognomy
and its ' seniority '.
Whatever the quantitative disproportion of the masses they
respectively involve, inorganic and organic chemistry are only
and can only be two inseparable facets of one and the same
telluric operation. And the second, no less than the first, must be
regarded as already under way in the infancy of the earth. We
are back at the refrain that runs all the way through this book.
In the world, nothing could ever burst forth as final across the different
thresholds successively traversed by evolution (however critical they be)
which has not already existed in an obscure and primordial way. If
the organic had not existed on earth from the first moment at
which it was possible, it would never have begun later.
There is good reason to think that around our nascent planet,
in addition to the inchoation of a metallic barysphere, a siliceous
lithospherc, a hydrosphere and an atmosphere, there was the out-
line of a special envelope, the antithesis, we might say, of the first
four : the temperate zone of polymerisation, in which water,
ammonia and carbon dioxide were already floating in the rays of
the sun. To ignore that tenuous fdm would be to deprive the
infant earth of its most essential adornment. For, as we shall see,
it is in this that the ' within of the earth ' was soon to be gradually
concentrated (if we hold to what I have already said).
2. THE WITHIN
When I speak of the ' within ' of the earth, I do not of course mean
those material depths in which — a few miles beneath our feet —
lurks one of the most vexatious mysteries of science : the
chemical nature and the exact physical condition of the internal
regions of the globe. The ' within ' is used here, as in the preceding
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THE PHENOMENON OP MAN
chapter, to denote the ' psychic ' face of that portion of the stuff
of the cosmos enclosed from the beginning of time within the
narrow scope of the early earth. In that fragment of sidereal
matter which has just been isolated, as in every other part of the
universe, the exterior world must inevitably be lined at every
point with an interior one. This we have shown already. Only
here the conditions have changed. Matter no longer spreads out
beneath our eyes in diffuse and undehnable layers. It coils up
round itself in a closed volume. How will its ' inner ' layer react to
such involution?
First let it be noted that, by the very fact of the individualisa-
tion of our planet, a certain mass of elementary consciousness was
originally emprisoned in the matter of earth. Some scientists have
felt obliged to invest some interstellar germs with the power of
fecundating cooling stars. This hypothesis disfigures, without
explaining, the wonderful phenomenon of life, with its noble
corollary, the phenomenon of man. It is in fact quite useless.
Why should we turn to space to look for a fecundating principle
for the earth — which is incomprehensible in any case ? By its
initial chemical composition, the early earth is itself, and in its
totality, the incredibly complex germ we are seeking. Con-
genially, if I may use the word, it already carried pre-life within
it, and this, moreover, in definite quantity. The whole question is to
define how, from this primitive and essentially elastic quantum,
all the rest has emerged.
To form an idea of the first phases of this evolution it will be
enough to compare, stage by stage, on the one hand the general
laws we have felt able to lay down for the development of spiritual
energy, and on the other the physico-chemical conditions we
have just acknowledged in the nascent earth. We have said that
spiritual energy, by its very nature, increases in ' radial ' value,
positively, absolutely, and without determinable limits, in step
with the increasing chemical complexity of the elements of which
it represents the inner lining. But the chemical complexity of the
earth increases in conformity with the laws of thermo-dynamics
in the particular, superficial zone in which its elements polymerise.
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THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES
If we put these two propositions side by side wc see that they
interweave and shed light upon each other without ambiguity.
With one accord they tell us that prc-life is no sooner enclosed
in the nascent earth than it emerges from the torpor to which it
appeared to have been condemned by its diffusion in space. Its
activities, hitherto dormant, are now set in motion pari passu
with the awakening of the forces of synthesis enclosed in matter.
And at one and the same stroke, over the whole surface of the
new-formed globe, the tension of internal freedoms begins to
rise.
Let us look more attentively at this mysterious surface.
A character to be noted at the outset is the extremely small
size and the extremely great number of the particles of which it
consists. For a thickness of some miles, in water, in air, in muddy
deposits, ultra-microscopic grains of protein are thickly strewn
over the surface of the earth. Our imaginations boggle at the
mere thought of counting the flakes of this snow. Yet if we
take it that pre-life has already emerged in the atom, are not these
myriads of large molecules just what we ought to expect?
But there is another point to consider.
In a sense more remarkable than their multitude (and as
important to keep in mind for future developments) is the solid-
arity due to their very genesis which unites the specks of this
primordial dust of consciousness. That which permits the growth
of elementary freedoms is, essentially, I repeat, the growing
synthesis of the molecules they subtend. And let me also repeat
that this synthesis itself would never take place if the globe as a
whole did not enfold within a closed surface the layers of its
substance.
Thus, wherever we look on earth, the growth of the ' within '
only takes place thanks to a double related involution, the coiling up
of the molecule upon itself and the coiling up of the planet upon
itself. 1 The initial quantum of consciousness contained in our
terrestrial world is not formed merely of an aggregate of particles
1 Precisely the conditions wc find later on, at the other end of evolution,
pre&iding over the genesis of the ' noosphere '.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
caught fortuitously in the same net. It represents a correlated
mass of infinitesimal centres structurally bound together by the
conditions of their origin and development.
Here again, but in a better defined field and on a higher level,
we find the fundamental condition characteristic of primordial
matter — the unity of plurality. The earth was probably born by
accident ; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of
evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was
immediately made use of and recast into something naturally
directed. By the very mechanism of its birth, the film in which
the ' within ' of the earth was concentrated and deepened emerges
under our eyes in the form of an organic whole in which no ele-
ment can any longer be separated from those surrounding it.
Another ' indivisible ' has appeared at the heart of the great
' indivisible ' which is the universe. In truth, a pre-biosphere.
And this is the envelope which, taken in its entirety, is to
be our sole preoccupation from now on.
As wc continue peering into the abysses of the past, wc can
sec its colour changing.
From age to age it increases in intensity. Something is going
to burst out upon the early earth, and this dung is Life.
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