object:1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
CHAPTER lO
THE FORMATION OF
THE NOOSPHERE 1
A Plausible Biological lnte?-pretation of Human History
gradually, but BY an irresistible process
(since and through the work of Auguste Comte,
Cournot, Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl and many others)
the organic is tending to supersede the juridical ap-
proach in the concepts and formulations of sociol-
1 Note in the Revue des Questions Scientifiques where this essay
originally appeared: "To avoid misunderstanding it may be
well to point out that the general synthesis oudined in these
pages makes no claim to replace or to exclude the theologi-
cal account of human destiny. The description of the Mo-
sphere and its attendant biology as here propounded, is no
more opposed to the Divine Transcendence, to Grace, to
the Incarnation or to the ultimate Parousia, than is the sci-
ence of palaeontology to the Creation, or of embryology to
the First Cause. The reverse is true. To those prepared to
follow the author in his thinking it will be apparent that bi-
ology merges into theology, and that the Word made Flesh
is to be regarded, not as a postulate of science — which
would be in the nature of things absurd — but as something,
a mysterious Alpha and Omega, taking its place within the
whole plan of the universe, both human and divine." Pierre
Charles, S.J.
150 THE FUTURE OF MAN
ogists. A sense of collectivity, arising in our minds out of the evo-
lutionary sense, has imposed a framework of entirely new dimen-
sions upon all our thinking; so that Mankind has come to present
itself to our gaze less and less as a haphazard and extrinsic asso-
ciation of individuals, and increasingly as a biological entity
wherein, in some sort, the proceedings and the necessities of the
universe in movement are furthered and achieve their culmination.
We feel that the relation between Society and Social Organism is
no longer a matter of symbolism but must be treated in realistic
terms. But the question then arises as to how, in this shifting of val-
ues, this passage from the juridical to the organic, we may correctly
apply the analogy. How are we to escape from metaphor without
falling into the trap of establishing absurd and oversimplified par-
allels which would make of the human species no more than a kind
of composite, living animal? This is the difficulty which modern
sociology encounters.
It is with the idea and in the hope of advancing toward a so-
lution of the problem that I here venture, basing my argument on
the widest possible zoological and biological grounds, to put for-
ward a coherent view of the "thinking Earth" in which I believe
we may find undistorted but yet embodying the corrections re-
quired by a change of order, the whole process of Life and of vi-
talization.
To the natural scientist Mankind offers a profoundly enigmatic
object of study. Anatomically, as Linnaeus perceived, Man differs
so little from the other higher primates that, in strict terms of the
criteria normally applied in zoological classification, his group rep-
resents no more than a very small offshoot, certainly far less than
an Order, within the framework of the category as a whole. But in
"biospherical" terms, if I may be allowed the word, man's place on
earth is not only predominant but to a certain extent exclusive
among living creatures. The small family of hominids, the last
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 151
shoot to emerge from the main stem of Evolution, has of itself
achieved a degree of expansion equal to, or even greater than, that
of the greatest vertebrate layers (reptile or mammal) that ever in-
habited the earth. Moreover, at the rate it is going, we can already
foresee the day when it will have abolished or domesticated all
other forms of animal and even plant life.
What does this mean?
I believe that the paradox will disappear and the contradic-
tions be reconciled (with the immediate prospect of a vast field of
progress for the new sociology) if we adopt the following premises:
a We must first give their place in the mechanism of biologi-
cal evolution to the special forces released by the psychic phenom-
enon of hominization;
b Secondly we must enlarge our approach to encompass the
formation, taking place before our eyes and arising out of this fac-
tor of hominization, of a particular biological entity such as has
never before existed on earth — the growth, outside and above the
biosphere, 2 of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking
substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I
have given the name of the Noosphere. 3
Let us pursue the matter by successively examining (without at
any time leaving the plane of scientific thought):
1. The birth (or, what amounts to the same thing, the zoo-
logical structure);
2. The anatomy;
2 This term, invented by Suess, is sometimes interpreted (Vernadsky) in the
sense of the "terrestrial zone containing life." I use it here to mean the actual
layer of vitalized substance enveloping the earth.
3 From noos, mind: the terrestrial sphere of thinking substance.
152 THE FUTURE OF MAN
3. The physiology;
4. Finally the principal phases of growth of the Noo-
sphere.
1. Birth and Zoological Structure of the Noosphere
I have referred to the almost contradictory aspect which the
section "homo" in the order of primates assumes in the eyes of
natural scientists: that of a single family suddenly emerging, at the
end of the Tertiary era, to achieve the dimensions of a zoological
layer in itself.
If we are to appreciate this strange phenomenon we must look
back over the normal development of living forms before the com-
ing of man. It can be characterized in two words: from its first be-
ginnings it never ceased to be "phyletic" and "dispersive." Phyletic
in the first place: every species (or group of species) formed a sort
of shoot (or phylum) which was obliged to evolve "orthogeneti-
cally" 4 along certain prescribed lines (reduction or adaptation of
limbs, complication of teeth, increased specialization as carnivores
or herbivores, runners, burrowers, swimmers, flyers, etc.); and sec-
ondly dispersive, since the different phyla separated at certain
points of proliferation, certain "knots" which we may suppose to
be periods of particularly active mutation. Until the coming of
man the pattern of the Tree of Life was always that of a fan, a
spread of morphological radiations diverging more and more,
4 The word "orthogenesis" is here used in its widest sense: "A definite orienta-
tion offsetting the effect of chance in the play of heredity."
5 Dr. A. Blanc has recently given the name of "lysis" to this phenomenon of the
releasing of morphological forces.
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 153
each radiation culminating in a new "knot" and breaking into a
fan of its own.
But at the human level a radical change, seemingly due to the
spiritual phenomenon of Reflection, overtook this law of develop-
ment. It is generally accepted that what distinguishes man psycho-
logically from other living creatures is the power acquired by his
consciousness of turning in upon itself. The animal knows, it has
been said; but only man, among animals, knows that he knows.
This faculty has given birth to a host of new attributes in men —
freedom of choice, foresight, the ability to plan and to construct,
and many others. So much is clear to everyone. But what has per-
haps not been sufficiently noted is that, still by virtue of this power
of Reflection, living hominized elements become capable (indeed
are under an irresistible compulsion) of drawing close to one an-
other, of communicating, finally of uniting. The centers of con-
sciousness, acquiring autonomy as they emerge into the sphere of
reflection, tend to escape from their own phylum, which granulates
into a line of individuals. Instead they pass tangentially into a field
of attraction which forces one toward another, fiber to fiber, phy-
lum to phylum: with the result that the entire system of zoological
radiations which in the ordinary course would have culminated in
a knot and a fanning out of new divergent lines, now tends to fold
in upon itself. In time, with the reflexion of the individual upon
himself, there comes an inflexion, then a clustering together of the
living shoots, soon to be followed (because of the biological ad-
vantage which the group gains by its greater cohesion) by the
spread of the living complex thus constituted over the whole sur-
face of the globe. The critical point of reflexion for the biological
unit becomes the critical point of "inflexion" for the phyla, which
in turn becomes the point of "circumflexion" (if I may use the
word) for the whole sheaf of inward-folding phyla. Or, if you pre-
154 THE FUTURE OF MAN
fer, the reflective coiling of the individual upon himself leads to the
coiling of the phyla upon each other, which in turn leads to the
coiling of the whole system about the closed convexity of the ce-
lestial body which carries us. Or we may talk in yet other terms of
psychic centration, phyletic intertwining and planetary envelop-
ment: three genetically associated occurrences which, taken to-
gether, give birth to the Noosphere.
Viewed in this aspect, entirely borne out by experience, the
collective human organism which the economists so hazily envis-
age emerges decisively from the mists of speculation to take its
place and assume the brilliance of a clearly defined star of the first
magnitude in the zoological sky Until this point was reached Na-
ture, in her generalized effort of "complexification," to which I
shall return later, had failed for lack of suitable material to achieve
any grouping of individuals outside the family structure (the ter-
mitary, the ant hill, the hive). With man, thanks to the extraordi-
nary agglutinative property of thought, she has at last been able to
achieve, throughout an entire living group, a total synthesis of
which the process is still clearly apparent, if we trouble to look, in
the "scaled" structure of the modern human world. Anthropolo-
gists, sociologists and historians have long noted, without being
very well able to account for it, the enveloping and concretion-
ary nature of the innumerable ethnic and cultural layers whose
growth, expansion and rhythmic overlapping endow humanity
with its present aspect of extreme variety in unity. This "bulbary"
appearance becomes instantly and luminously clear if, as suggested
above, we regard the human group, in zoological terms, as simply
a normal sheaf of phyla in which, owing to the emergence of a
powerful field of attraction, the fundamental divergent tendency of
the evolutionary radiations is overcome by a stronger force induc-
ing them to converge. In present-day mankind, within (as I call it)
the Noosphere, we are for the first time able to contemplate, at the
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 155
very top of the evolutionary tree, the result that can be produced
by a synthesis not merely of individuals but of entire zoological
shoots.
Thus we find ourselves in the presence, in actual possession, of
the superorganism we have been seeking, of whose existence we
were intuitively aware. The collective mankind which the sociolo-
gists needed for the furtherance of their speculations and formula-
tions now appears scientifically defined, manifesting itself in its
proper time and place, like an object entirely new and yet awaited
in the sky of life. It remains for us to observe the world by the light
it sheds, which throws into astonishing relief the great ensemble of
everyday phenomena with which we have always lived, without
perceiving their reality, their immediacy or their vastness.
2. Anatomy of the Noosphere
IT may BE said, speaking in very general terms, that in asserting
the zoological nature of the Noosphere we confirm the sociolo-
gists' view of human institutions as organic. Once the exceptional,
but fundamentally biological, nature of the collective human com-
plex is accepted, nothing prevents us (provided we take into ac-
count the modifications which have occurred in the dimensions in
which we are working) from treating as authentic organs the di-
verse social organisms which have gradually evolved in the course
of the history of the human race. Directly Mankind, from the na-
ture of its origin, presents itself to our experience as a true su-
perbody, the internal connections of this body, by reason of
homogeneity, can only be treated and understood as superorgans
and supermembers. Thus, for example (due allowance being made
for the change of scale and environment), it becomes legitimate to
talk in the sphere of economics of the existence and development
156 THE FUTURE OF MAN
of a circulatory or a nutritional system applicable to Mankind as a
whole.
That we must proceed slowly and critically in this attempt to
construct an "anatomy" of society is evident. Used without dis-
cernment and a profound knowledge of biology, the procedure is
in danger of lapsing into puerile and sterile subtleties. But pro-
gressively pursued, and proceeding from certain major fields of
knowledge, the method shows itself to be both fruitful and illumi-
nating. This is what I shall seek to demonstrate in the three spheres
of culture, machinery and research, by successively "dissecting"
first the hereditary, then the mechanical and finally the cerebral
apparatus of the Noosphere.
a The apparatus of heredity. One of the paradoxes attaching to
the human species, a cause of some bitterness among biologists, is
that every man comes into the world as defenseless, and as inca-
pable of finding his way single-handed in our civilization, as the
newborn Sinanthropus a hundred thousand years ago. As Jean
Rostand has remarked, during the many centuries man has
striven to improve himself the fruits of his labors have brought
about no organic change in him, they have not affected his chro-
mosomes. So much so, the author goes on to imply, that all the ad-
vances on which we so pride ourselves remain biologically
precarious, superficial or even exterior to ourselves. There is much
that might be said about this; but let us pass over the question of
whether we have not undergone some modification, even in our
chromosomes, since the era of the pre-Hominids or even that of
Cro-Magnon man. Let us concede provisionally that we have de-
veloped no hereditary trait in that period rendering us more
innately capable of perception and movement in the new dimen-
6 Pensees d'un biologiste, pp. 32-5.
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 157
sions of society, space and time. How does this affect our appreci-
ation and evaluation of human progress? I shall show that the an-
swer is splendid and highly encouraging — provided we do not lose
sight of the organic reality of the Noosphere.
"Separate the newborn child from human society," you may
say, "and you will see how weak he is!" But surely it is clear that
this act of isolation is precisely what must not be done, and indeed
cannot be done. From the moment when, as I have said, the phyletic
strands began to reach toward one another, weaving the first out-
lines of the Noosphere, a new matrix, coextensive with the whole
human group, was formed about the newly born human child — a
matrix out of which he cannot be wrenched without incurring mu-
tilation in the most physical core of his biological being. Traditions
of every kind, hoarded and manifested in gesture and language, in
schools, libraries, museums, bodies of law and religion, philosophy
and science — everything that accumulates, arranges itself, recurs
and adds to itself, becoming the collective memory of the human
race — all this we may see as no more than an outer garment, an
epiphenomenon precariously superimposed upon all the other ed-
ifices of Nature (the only truly organic ones, as it may appear): but
it is precisely this optical illusion which we have to overcome if our
realism is to reach to the heart of the matter. It is undoubtedly true
that before Man hereditary characteristics were transmitted prin-
cipally through the reproductive cells. But after the coming of
Man another kind of heredity shows itself and becomes predomi-
nant; one which was indeed foreshadowed and essayed long before
Man, among the highest forms of insects and vertebrates. 7 This is
the heredity of example and education. In Man, as though by a
7 A small cynocephalus (baboon), born in captivity, will commit all kinds of
blunders when set free (heredity of education). But in similar conditions a
young otter, being put in the water, will at once know how to behave (chromo-
somic heredity). Cf. Eugene N. Marais, The Soul of the White Ant.
158 THE FUTURE OF MAN
stroke of genius on the part of Life, and in accord with the grand
phenomenon of phyletic coiling, heredity, hitherto primarily chro-
mosomic (that is to say, carried by the genes) becomes primarily
"Noospheric" — transmitted, that is to say, by the surrounding en-
vironment. In this new form, and having lost nothing of its physi-
cal reality (indeed, as much superior to its first state as the
Noosphere is superior to the simple, isolated phylum) it acquires,
by becoming exterior to the individual, an incomparable substance
and capacity. For let me put this question: what system of chro-
mosomes would be as capable as our immense educational system
of indefinitely storing and infallibly preserving the huge array of
truths and systematized technical knowledge which, steadily accu-
mulating, represents the patrimony of mankind?
Exteriorization, enrichment: we must not lose sight of these
two words. We shall come upon them again, quite unchanged,
when we turn to consider the machine.
b The mechanical apparatus. The fact was noted long ago:** what
has enabled man zoologically to emerge and triumph upon earth,
is that he has avoided the anatomical mechanization of his body.
In all other animals we find a tendency, irresistible and clearly ap-
parent, for the living creature to convert into tools, its own limbs,
its teeth and even its face. We see paws turned into pincers, paws
equipped with hooves for running, burrowing paws and muzzles,
winged paws, beaks, tusks and so on — innumerable adaptations
giving birth to as many phyla, and each ending in a blind alley of
specialization. On this dangerous slope leading to organic impris-
onment Man alone has pulled up in time. Having arrived at the
tetrapod stage he contrived to stay there without further reducing
8 e.g., £douard Le Roy, Les Origines Humaines et le Probleme de V Intelligence.
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 159
the versatility of his limbs. Possessing hands as well as intelligence,
and being able, in consequence, to devise artificial instruments and
multiply them indefinitely without becoming somatically involved,
he has succeeded, while increasing and boundlessly extending his
mechanical efficiency, in preserving intact his freedom of choice
and power of reason.
The significance and biological function of the tool at last sep-
arated from the limb has, as I was saying, long been recognized; and
it has long been realized that the tool separated from Man develops
a kind of autonomous vitality. 9 We have passive machines giving
birth to the active machine, which in turn is followed by the auto-
matic machine. Those are the main classifications; but within each
classification what an immense proliferation there is of branches
and offshoots, each endowed with a sort of evolutionary potential,
irresistible both logically and biologically! We have only to think of
the automobile or the airplane.
All this has been noted and often said. But what has not yet
been sufficiently taken into account, although it explains every-
thing, is the extent to which this process of mechanization is a
collective affair, and the way in which it finally creates, on the pe-
riphery of the human race, an organism that is collective in its na-
ture and amplitude.
Let us consider this.
With and since the coming of Man, as we have seen, a new law
of Nature has come into force — that of convergence. The conver-
gence of the phyla both ensues from, and of itself leads to, the
coming together of individuals within the peculiarly "attaching" at-
mosphere created by the phenomenon of Reflexion. And out of this
9 e.g.. Jacques Lafitte, Reflexions sur la Science de la Machine. La Nouvelle Journee, no.
2i, 1932.
160 THE FUTURE OF MAN
convergence, as I have said, there arises a very real social inheritance,
produced by the synthetic recording of human experience. But if we
look for it we may observe precisely the same phenomenon in the
case of the machine. Every new tool conceived in the course of his-
tory, although it may have been invented in the first place by an in-
dividual, has rapidly become the instrument of all men; and not
merely by being passed from hand to hand, spreading from one man
to his neighbor, but by being adopted corporatively by all men to-
gether. What started as an individual creation has been immediately
and automatically transformed into a global, quasi-autonomous
possession of the entire mass of men. We see this from prehistoric
times, and we see it with a vivid clarity in the present era of industrial
explosion. Consider the locomotive, the dynamo, the airplane, the
cinema, the radio — anything. Can there be any doubt that these in-
numerable appliances are born and grow, successively and in unison,
from roots established in an existing mechanical world-state? For a
long time past there have been neither isolated inventors nor ma-
chines. To an increasing extent every machine comes into being as a
function of every other machine; and, again to an increasing extent,
all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form a single, vast,
organized mechanism. Necessarily following the inflexive tendency
of the zoological phyla, the mechanical phyla in their turn curve in-
ward in the case of man, thus accelerating and multiplying their own
growth and forming a single gigantic network girdling the earth.
And the basis, the inventive core of this vast apparatus, what is it if
not the thinking center of the Noosphere?
When Homofaber came into being the first rudimentary tool
was born as an appendage of the human body. Today the tool has
been transformed into a mechanized envelope (coherent within it-
self and immensely varied) appertaining to all mankind. From be-
ing somatic it has become "noospheric." And just as the individual
at the outset was enabled by the tool to preserve and develop his
THE FORMATION OF THE NOO SPHERE 161
first, elemental psychic potentialities, so today the Noosphere, dis-
gorging the machine from its innermost organic recesses, is capa-
ble of, and in process of, developing a brain of its own.
c The cerebral apparatus. Between the human brain, with its mil-
liards of interconnected nerve cells, and the apparatus of social
thought, with its millions of individuals thinking collectively, there
is an evident kinship which biologists of the stature of Julian Hux-
ley have not hesitated to examine and expand on critical lines. 10
On the one hand we have a single brain, formed of nervous nu-
clei, and on the other a Brain of brains. It is true that between
these two organic complexes a major difference exists. Whereas in
the case of the individual brain thought emerges from a system of
nonthinking nervous fibers, in the case of the collective brain each
separate unit is in itself an autonomous center of reflection. If the
comparison is to be a just one we must, at every point of resem-
blance, take this difference into account. But when all allowance is
made the fact remains that the analogies between the two systems
are so numerous, and so compelling, that reason forbids us to re-
gard the parallel as either purely superficial or a mere matter of
chance. Let us take a rapid glance at the structure and functioning
of what might be termed the "cerebroid" organ of the Noosphere.
First the structure: and here I must turn back to the machine.
I have said that, thanks to the machine, Man has contrived both
severally and collectively to prevent the best of himself from being
absorbed in purely physiological and functional uses, as has hap-
pened to other animals. But in addition to its protective note, how
can we fail to see the machine as playing a constructive part in the
creation of a truly collective consciousness? It is not merely a mat-
ter of the machine which liberates, relieving both individual and
10 Lecture delivered in New York and published in the Scientific Monthly, 1940.
162 THE FUTURE OF MAN
collective thought of the trammels which hinder its progress, but
also of the machine which creates, helping to assemble, and to
concentrate in the form of an ever more deeply penetrating or-
ganism, all the reflective elements upon earth.
I am thinking, of course, in the first place of the extraordinary
network of radio and television communications which, perhaps
anticipating the direct syntonization of brains through the myste-
rious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of "etherized"
universal consciousness.
But I am also thinking of the insidious growth of those aston-
ishing electronic computers which, pulsating with signals at the
rate of hundreds of thousands a second, not only relieve our brains
of tedious and exhausting work but, because they enhance the es-
sential (and too little noted) factor of "speed of thought," are also
paving the way for a revolution in the sphere of research. And
there are other forms of technical equipment, such as the elec-
tronic microscope whereby our sensory vision, the principal source
of our ideas, has been enabled to leap the optical gap between the
cell and the direct observation of large molecules.
There is a school of philosophy which smiles disdainfully at
these and kindred forms of progress. "Commercial machines," we
hear them say, "machines for people in a hurry, designed to gain
time and money." One is tempted to call them blind, since they fail
to perceive that all these material instruments, ineluctably linked in
their birth and development, are finally nothing less than the man-
ifestation of a particular kind of super-Brain, capable of attaining
mastery over some supersphere in the universe and in the realm of
thought. "Everything for the individual!" — such was the reaffirma-
tion of my brilliant friend, Gaylord Simpson, 11 in a recent outburst
11 George Gaylord Simpson, "The Role of the Individual in Evolution," Jour-
nal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 31, no. 1, 1941.
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSP.HERE 163
of antitotalitarian fervor. But let us grasp this point clearly. No
doubt it is true, scientifically speaking, that no distinct center of su-
perhuman consciousness has yet appeared on earth (at least in the
living world) for which it may be claimed or predicted that one day
it will exercise a centralizing function, in relation to associated hu-
man thought, similar to the role of the individual "I" in relation to
the cells of the brain. But that is far from saying that, influenced by
the links which unite them, our grouped minds working together
are not capable of achieving results which no one member of the
group could achieve alone, and from which every individual within
the collective process benefits "integrally," although still not in the
total sense.
We have only to consider any of the new concepts and intu-
itions which, particularly during the past century, have become or
are in process of becoming the indestructible keystones and fabric
of our thought — the idea of the atom, for example, or of organic
Time or Evolution. It is surely obvious that no man on earth could
alone have evolved them; no one man, thinking by himself, can en-
compass, master or exhaust them; yet every man on earth shares,
in himself in the universal heightening of consciousness promoted
by the existence in our minds of these new concepts of matter and
new dimensions of cosmic reality. It is not a question of simple
repetitive "summation" but of synthesis. Not, it is true (at least not
yet, here below) synthesis pushed to the point where it calls into be-
ing some new kind of autonomous supercenter in the depths of
the synthesized, but a synthesis which at least suffices to erect, as
though it were a vault above our heads, a sphere of mutually rein-
forced consciousness, the seat, support and instrument of supervi-
sion and superideas. No doubt everything proceeds from the
individual and in the first instance depends on the individual; but
it is on a higher level than the individual that everything achieves
its fulfillment.
164 THE FUTURE OF MAN
We have touched upon the apparatus of heredity, machinery
and mind. It would be rash and often absurd to attempt to pursue
further, and in detail, the comparison between the organism of the
individual and that of the Noosphere. But the fact that the general
line of analogy is valid and fruitful seems to me to be definitely
proved by the very remarkable fact that these three systems, taken
in conjunction, not only form a complementary and coherent
whole, consistent within itself, but, which is even more easy of
demonstration, that this whole is capable of breaking into motion
and of working — that it Junctions , in a word.
3. The Physiology of the Noosphere
ONE OF the most impressive effects of the power of collective vi-
sion which is conferred upon us by the formation of a common
brain is the perception of "great slow movements," so vast and
slow that they are only observable over immense stretches of time.
The currents that give birth to sidereal systems; the folds and up-
thrusts that form mountains and continents; the ebb and flow
within the biosphere — in each case what we had supposed to be
the extreme of immobility and stability is discovered to be a state
of fundamental and irresistible movement.
So it is with the Noosphere.
I have already attempted a sort of anatomy of the major or-
gans of the Noosphere. It remains for me to show that these sepa-
rate parts, planetary in their dimensions, are not designed to
remain in a state of rest. The formidable wheels turn, and in their
combined action hidden forces are engendered which circulate
throughout the gigantic system. What goes on around us in the hu-
man mass is not merely a flurry of disordered movement, as in a
gas; something is purposefully stirring, as in a living being.
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 165
Let us try to gain some understanding of this vast internal
process of which we are all a part and to which we all contribute,
almost without knowing it.
At the heart of the entire movement, like the mainspring of a
clock, there reappears, in identifiable form, what we have termed
the inflexion of human stems upon themselves. It was of this myste-
riously compelled in-folding, as I have said, that the human race
was born. I will now add that it is through the continued operation
of the same movement that the race persists and functions. Indeed,
we have only to open our eyes to be as it were spellbound by the
dazzling vision, the spectacle of human shoots caught in the com-
bined play of irresistible forces which slowly but surely continue to
close and coil about us. Despite the havoc of war, the population
on the limited surface of this planet which bears us is increasing in
almost geometrical progression; while at the same time the scope
of each human molecule, in terms of movement, information and
influence, is becoming rapidly coextensive with the whole surface
of the globe. A state of tightening compression, in short; but even
more, thanks to the biological intermingling developed to its utter-
most extent by the appearance of Reflection, a state of organized
compenetration, in which each element is linked with every other.
No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic
and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever-increasing speed
which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each
of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossi-
ble for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.
What is the significance of this multiform embrace, both ex-
ternal and internal, against which we struggle in vain? Can it mean
that, caught in the ramifications of a sightless mechanism, we are
destined to perish by stifling each other? No; for as the coil grows
tighter and the tension rises the forces of supercompression in the
vast generator find an effective outlet.
166 THE FUTURE OF MAN
We begin to catch sight of it in the study of an all too familiar
phenomenon, disquieting in appearance, but in fact highly reveal-
ing and reassuring — the phenomenon of unemployment. Owing to the
extraordinarily rapid development of the machine a rapidly in-
creasing number of workers, running into tens of millions, are out
of work. The experts gaze in dismay at this economic apparatus,
their own creation, which instead of absorbing all the units of hu-
man energy with which they furnish it rejects an increasing num-
ber, as though the machine they devised were working to defeat
their purpose. Economists are horrified by the growing number of
idle hands. Why do they not look a little more to biology for
guidance and enlightenment? In its progress through a million
centuries, mounting from the depths of the unconscious to con-
sciousness, when has Life proceeded otherwise than by releasing
psychic forces through the medium of the mechanisms it has de-
vised? We have only to consider the evolution of the nervous sys-
tem in the animal series, proceeding by chronological stages over a
great period of time. Or let the theorists consider themselves. How
are they capable of reasoning at all if not because within them
their visceral system has been taught to function automatically,
while around them society is so well organized that they have both
the strength and the leisure to calculate and reflect? What is true
for each individual man is precisely what is happening at this mo-
ment on the higher level of mankind. Like a heavenly body that
heats as it contracts, such, and in a twofold respect, is the Noo-
sphere: first in intensity, the degree in which its tension and psychic
temperature are heightened by the coming together and mutual
stimulation of thinking centers throughout its extent; and also
quantitatively through the growing number of people able to use
their brains because they are freed from the need to labor with
their hands. So that to attempt to suppress unemployment by in-
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 167
corporating the unemployed in the machine would be against the
purpose of Nature and a biological absurdity. The Noosphere can
function only by releasing more and more spiritual energy with an
ever higher potential.
To all this you may remark as follows: "Very well; let us agree
that the combined effect of phyletic intertwining and mechanical
progress causes life to boil over. But in that case, and surely it is the
root of the matter, how are we to canalize and use the rising tide
of liberated consciousness, that is still so crude and unformed?"
My answer is: "By transforming it." And at this point, having in-
vited you to reflect upon the phenomenon of unemployment, I will
draw your attention to another and no less universal phenomenon,
equally characteristic of the present age — the phenomenon of research.
Understanding, discovery, invention . . . From the first awak-
ening of his reflective consciousness, Man has been possessed by
the demon of discovery; but until a very recent epoch this pro-
found need remained latent, diffused and unorganized in the hu-
man mass. In every past generation true seekers, those by vocation
or profession, are to be found; but in the past they were no more
than a handful of individuals, generally isolated, and of a type
that was virtually abnormal — the "inquisitive." Today, without our
having noticed it, the situation is entirely changed. In fields em-
bracing every aspect of physical matter, life and thought, the
research-workers are to be numbered in hundreds of thousands,
and they no longer work in isolation but in teams endowed with
penetrative powers that it seems nothing can withstand. In this re-
spect too, the movement is becoming generalized and is accelerat-
ing to the point where we must be blind not to see in it an essential
trend in human affairs. Research, which until yesterday was a lux-
ury pursuit, is in process of becoming a major, indeed the princi-
pal, function of humanity. As to the significance of this great event,
168 THE FUTURE OF MAN
I for my part can see only one way to account for it. It is that the
enormous surplus of free energy released by the in-folding of the
Noosphere is destined by a natural evolutionary process to flow
into the construction and functioning of what I have called its
"Brain." As in the case of all the organisms preceding it, but on an
immense scale, humanity is in process of "cerebralizing" itself.
And our proper biological course, in making use of what we call
our leisure, is to devote it to a new kind of work on a higher plane:
that is to say, to a general and concerted effort of vision. The Noo-
sphere, in short, is a stupendous thinking machine.
It is in this sense alone, as I believe, that the horizon appears
and we can gain a clear view of the human world surrounding us.
In harmony with the cosmic impulse which leads to the constant
disintegration of atoms and the attendant release of energy, Life
(though probably localized on a few rare planets) compels us in-
creasingly to view it as an underlying current in the flow of which
matter tends to order itself upon itself with the emergence of con-
sciousness. On the one hand we have physical radiation bound
up with disintegration; and on the other hand psychic radiation
bound up with an ordered aggregation of the stuff of the universe.
In the eyes of nineteenth-century science the interiorization of the
world, leading to the phenomenon of Reflection, might still pass
for an accident and an anomaly. We now see it to be a clearly de-
fined process coextensive with the whole of reality. Complexifi-
cation due to the growth of consciousness, or consciousness the
outcome of complexity: experimentally the two terms are insepa-
rable. Like a pair of related quantities they vary simultaneously.
And surely it is within this generalized cosmic process that the
Noosphere, a particular and extreme case, has its natural place and
takes its shape. The maximum of complication, represented by
phyletic in-folding, and in consequence the maximum of con-
sciousness emerging from the system of individual brains, coordi-
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 169
nated and mutually supporting. And this is exactly what was to be
expected.
But it is assuredly a remarkable coincidence that in justifying
the organic interpretation of the Phenomenon of Man, as we have
sought to do, we should also be paving the way for a reasonable
forecast as to our future destiny, and the fate which is reserved for
us at the end of Time.
4. The Phases and Future of the Noosphere
we have found it possible to express the social totalization
which we are undergoing in terms of a clearly identifiable biolog-
ical process: proceeding from this we may surely look into the fu-
ture and predict the course of the trajectory we are describing.
Once we have accepted that the formation of a collective human
organism, a Noosphere, conforms to the general law of recurrence
which leads to the heightening of Consciousness in the universe as
a function of complexity, a vast prospect opens before us. To what
regions and through what phases may we suppose that the exten-
sion of the rising curve of hominization will carry us?
Immediately confronting us (indeed, already in progress) we
have what may be called a "phase of planetization."
It can truly be said, no doubt, that the human group succeeded
long ago in covering the face of the earth, and that over a long pe-
riod its state of zoological ubiquity has tended to be transformed
into an organized aggregate; but it must be clear that the transfor-
mation is only now reaching its point of full maturity. Let us glance
over the main stages of this long history of aggregation. First, in
the depths of the past, we find a thin scattering of hunting groups
spread here and there throughout the Ancient World. At a later
stage, some fifteen thousand years ago, we see a second scattering,
170 THE FUTURE OF MAN
very much more dense and clearly defined: that of agricultural
groups installed in fertile valleys — centers of social life where man,
arrived at a state of stability achieved the expansive powers which
were to enable him to invade the New World. Then, only seven or
eight thousand years ago, there came the first civilizations, each
covering a large part of a continent. These were succeeded by the
real empires. And so on . . . patches of humanity growing steadily
larger, overlapping, often absorbing one another, thereafter to
break apart and again reform in still larger patches. As we view this
process, the spreading, thickening and irresistible coalescence, can
we fail to perceive its eventual outcome? The last blank spaces have
vanished from the map of mankind. There is contact everywhere,
and how close it has become! Today, embedded in the economic
and psychic network which I have described, two great human
blocks alone remain confronting one another. Is it not inevitable
that in one way or another these two will eventually coalesce? Pre-
ceded by a tremor, a wave of "shared impulse" extending to the
very depths of the social and ethnic masses in their need and claim
to participate, without distinction of class or color, in the onward
march of human affairs, the final act is already visibly preparing.
Although the form is not yet discernible, mankind tomorrow will
awaken to a "panorganized" world.
But, and we must make no mistake about this, there will be an
essential difference, a difference of order, between the unitary state
toward which we are moving and everything we have hitherto
known. The greatest empires in history have never covered more
than fragments of the earth. What will be the specifically new
manifestations which we have to look for in the transition to total-
ity? Until now we have never seen mind manifest itself on this
planet except in separated groups and in the static state. What
sort of current will be generated, what unknown territory will be
opened up, when the circuit is suddenly completed?
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHER.E 171
I believe that what is now being shaped in the bosom of plan-
etized humanity is essentially a rebounding of evolution upon itself.
We all know about the real or imaginary projectiles whose impetus
is renewed by the firing of a series of staged rockets. Some such
procedure, it seems to me, is what Life is preparing at this moment,
to accomplish the supreme, ultimate leap. The first stage was the
elaboration of lower organisms, up to and including Man, by
the use and irrational combination of elementary sources of en-
ergy received or released by the planet. The second stage is the
superevolution of Man, individually and collectively, by the use of
refined forms of energy scientifically harnessed and applied in the
bosom of the Noosphere, thanks to the coordinated efforts of all
men working reflectively and unanimously upon themselves. Who
can say whither, coiled back upon our own organism, our com-
bined knowledge of the atom, of hormones, of the cell and the
laws of heredity will take us? Who can say what forces may be re-
leased, what radiations, what new arrangements never hitherto at-
tempted by Nature, what formidable powers we may henceforth be
able to use, for the first time in the history of the world? This is Life
setting out upon a second adventure from the springboard it es-
tablished when it created humankind.
But all this is no more than the outward face of the phenome-
non. In becoming plane tized humanity is acquiring new physical
powers which will enable it to superorganize matter. And, even
more important, is it not possible that by the direct converging of
its members it will be able, as though by resonance, to release psy-
chic powers whose existence is still unsuspected? I have already
spoken of the recent emergence of certain new faculties in our
minds, the sense of genetic duration and the sense of collectivity.
Inevitably, as a natural consequence, this awakening must enhance
in us, from all sides, a generalized sense of the organic, through
which the entire complex of interhuman and intercosmic relations
172 THE FUTURE OF MAN
will become charged with an immediacy, an intimacy and a real-
ism such as has long been dreamed of and apprehended by certain
spirits particularly endowed with the "sense of the universal," but
which has never yet been collectively applied. And it is in the depths
and by grace of this new inward sphere, the attribute of planetized
Life, that an event seems possible which has hitherto been inca-
pable of realization: I mean the pervasion of the human mass by
the power of sympathy It may in part be passive sympathy, a com-
munication of mind and spirit that will make the phenomenon of
telepathy, still sporadic and haphazard, both general and normal.
But above all it will be a state of active sympathy in which each
separate human element, breaking out of its insulated state under
the impulse of the high tensions generated in the Noosphere, will
emerge into a field of prodigious affinities, which we may already
conjecture in theory. For if the power of attraction between simple
atoms is so great, what may we not expect if similar bonds are con-
tracted between human molecules? Humanity, as I have said, is
building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that
tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the
movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which
the ultimate wholeness of its powers of unification can never be
fully achieved? To put it in other words, must not the constructive
developments now taking place within the Noosphere in the realm
of sight and reason necessarily also penetrate to the sphere of feel-
ing? The idea may seem fantastic when one looks at our present
world, still dominated by the forces of hatred and repulsion. But is
not this simply because we refuse to heed the admonitions of sci-
ence, which is daily proving to us, in every field, that seemingly im-
possible changes become easy and even inevitable direcdy there is
a change in the order of the dimensions?
To me two things, at least, now seem certain. The first is that,
following the state of collective organization we have already
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 173
achieved, the process of planetization can only advance ever further
in the direction of growing unanimity. And the second is that this
growth of unanimity, being of its nature convergent, cannot con-
tinue indefinitely without reaching the natural limit of its course.
Every cone has an apex. In the case of this human aggregation how
shall we seek, not to imagine but to define the supreme point of co-
alescence? In terms of the strictly phenomenal viewpoint which I
have adopted throughout this paper, it seems to me that the follow-
ing may be said:
What at the very beginning made the first man, was, as we
know, the heightening of the individual consciousness to the point
where it acquired the power of Reflection. And the measure of hu-
man progress during the centuries which followed is, as I have
sought to show, the increase of this reflective power through the in-
teraction, or conjugated thought, of conscious minds working
upon one another. Well, what will finally crown and limit collective
humanity at the ultimate stage of its evolution, is and must be, by
reason of continuity and homogeneity, the establishment of a sort
of focal point at the heart of the reflective apparatus as a whole.
If we concede this the whole of human history appears as a
progress between two critical points: from the lowest point of ele-
mentary consciousness to the ultimate, noospherical point of Re-
flection. In biological terms, humanity will have completed itself
and fully achieved its internal equilibrium only when it is psychi-
cally centered upon itself (which may yet take several million
years).
In a final effort of thought let us remove ourselves to that ulti-
mate summit where in the remote future, but seen from the present, the
tide which bears us reaches its culmination. Is there anything fur-
ther to be discerned beyond that last peak etched against the hori-
zon? — Yes and no.
In the first place no, because at that mysterious pole crowning
174 THE FUTURE OF MAN
our ascent the compass that has guided us runs amok. It was by the
law of "consciousness and complexity" that we set our course: a
consciousness becoming ever more centered, emerging from the
heart of an increasingly vast system of more numerous and better
organized elements. But now we are faced by an entirely new situ-
ation: for the first time we have no multiple material under our
hands. Unless, as seems infinitely improbable, we are destined by
contact with other thinking planets, across the abysses of space and
time, some day to become integrated within an organized complex
composed of a number of Noospheres, humanity, having reached
maturity, will remain alone, face to face with itself. And at the same
time our law of recurrence, based on the play of interrelated syn-
theses, will have ceased to operate.
So in one sense it all seems to be over; as though, having
reached its final point of Noospheric Reflexion, the cosmic impulse
toward consciousness has become exhausted, condemned to sink
back into the state of disintegration implacably imposed on it by
the laws of stellar physics. But in another sense nothing will be
ended: for at this point, and at the height of its powers, individual
consciousness acquires the formidable property something else
comes into operation, a primary attribute of Reflection concerning
which we have hitherto said nothing — the will to survive. In reflecting
upon itself the individual consciousness acquires the formidable
property of foreseeing the future, that is to say, death. And at the
same time it knows that it is psychologically impossible for it to con-
tinue to work in pursuance of the purposes of Life unless some-
thing, the best of the work, is preserved from total destruction. In
this resides the whole problem of action. We have not yet taken suf-
ficient account of the fact that this demand for the Absolute, not al-
ways easily discernible in the isolated human unit, is one of the
impulses which grow and are intensified in the Noosphere. Applied
THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE 175
to the individual the idea of total extinction may not at first sight
appall us; but extended to humanity as a whole it revolts and sick-
ens us. The fact is that the more Humanity becomes aware of its
duration, its number and its potentialities — and also of the enor-
mous burden it must bear in order to survive — the more does it re-
alize that if all this labor is to end in nothing, then we have been
cheated and can only rebel. In a planetized Humanity the insistence
upon irreversibility becomes a specific requisite of action; and it can
only grow and continue to grow as Life reveals itself as being ever
more rich, an ever heavier load. So that, paradoxically, it is at that
ultimate point of centration which renders it cosmically unique,
that is to say apparently incapable of any further synthesis, that the
Noosphere will have become charged to the fullest extent with psy-
chic energies to impel it forward in yet another advance. . . .
And what can this mean except that, like those planetary orbits
which seem to traverse our solar system without remaining within it,
the curve of consciousness, pursuing its course of growing complex-
ity, will break through the material framework of Time and Space to
escape somewhere toward an ultracenter of unification and consis-
tence, where there will finally be assembled, and in detail, every-
thing that is irreplaceable and incommunicable in the world.
And it is here, an inevitable intrusion in terms of biology, and
in its proper place in terms of science, that we come to the prob-
lem of God.
Conclusion: The Rise of Freedom
let us turn to cast an eye over the road that we have followed.
At the beginning we seemed to see around us nothing but a
disconnected and disordered humanity: the crowd, the mass, in
176 THE FUTURE OF MAN
which, it may be, we saw only brutality and ugliness. I have tried,
fortified by the most generally accepted and solid conclusions of
science, to take the reader above this scene of turmoil; and as we
have risen higher so has the prospect acquired a more ordered
shape. Like the petals of a gigantic lotus at the end of the day, we
have seen human petals of planetary dimensions slowly closing in
upon themselves. And at the heart of this huge calyx, beneath the
pressure of its in-folding, a center of power has been revealed
where spiritual energy, gradually released by a vast totalitarian
mechanism, then concentrated by heredity within a sort of super-
brain, has little by little been transformed into a common vision
growing ever more intense. In this spectacle of tranquillity and in-
tensity, where the anomalies of detail, so disconcerting on our in-
dividual scale, vanish to give place to a vast, serene and irresistible
movement from the heart, everything is contained and everything
harmonized in accord with the rest of the universe. Life and con-
sciousness are no longer chance anomalies in Nature; rather we
find in biology a complement to the physics of matter. On the one
hand, I repeat, the stuff of the world dispersing through the radi-
ation of its elemental energy; and on the other hand the same stuff
reconverging through the radiation of thought. The fantastic at ei-
ther end: but surely the one is necessary to balance the other? Thus
harmony is achieved in the ultimate perspective, and, furthermore,
a program for the future: for if this view is accepted we see a splen-
did goal before us, and a clear line of progress. Coherence and fe-
cundity, the two criteria of truth.
Is this all illusion, or is it reality?
It is for the reader to decide. But to those who hesitate, or who
refuse to commit themselves, I would say: "Have you anything else,
anything better to suggest that will account scientifically for the
phenomenon of man considered as a whole, in the light of his past
development and present progress?"
THE FORMATION OF THE NOO SPHERE 177
You may reply to me that this is all very well, but is there not
something lacking, an essential element, in this system which I
claim to be so coherent? Within that grandiose machine-in-motion
which I visualize, what becomes of that pearl beyond price, our
personal being? What remains of our freedom of choice and ac-
tion?
But do you not see that from the standpoint I have adopted it
appears everywhere — and is everywhere heightened?
I know very well that by a kind of innate obsession we cannot
rid ourselves of the idea that we become most masters of ourselves
by being as isolated as possible. But is not this the reverse of the
truth? We must not forget that in each of us, by our very nature,
everything is in an elemental state, including our freedom of ac-
tion. We can only achieve a wider degree of freedom by joining
and associating with others in an appropriate way. This is, to be
sure, a dangerous operation, since, whether it be a case of disor-
derly intermingling, or of some simple form of coordination, like
the meshing of gear-wheels, our activities tend to cancel one an-
other out or to become mechanical — we find this only too often in
practice. Yet it is also salutary, since the approach of spirit to spirit
in a common vision or a shared passion undoubtedly enriches all;
in the case of a team, for example, or of two lovers. Achieved with
sympathy, union does not restrict but exalts the possibilities of our
being. We see this everywhere and every day on a limited scale.
Why should it not be worth correspondingly more on a vast and
all-embracing scale, if the law applies to the very structure of
things? It is simply a question of tension within the field that po-
larizes and attracts. In the case of a blind aggregation, of some
form of purely mechanical arrangement, the effect of large num-
bers is to materialize our activities. That is true: but where it is a
matter of unanimity realized from within the effect is to personal-
ize them, and, I will add, to make them unerring. A single freedom,
178 THE FUTURE OF MAN
taken in isolation, is weak and uncertain and may easily lose itself
in mere groping. But a totality of freedom, freely operating, will al-
ways end by finding its road. And this incidentally is why through-
out this paper, without seeking to minimize the uncertainties
inherent in Man's freedom of choice in relation to the world, I
have been able implicitly to maintain that we are moving both
freely and ineluctably in the direction of concentration by way of
plane tization. One might put it that determinism appears at either
end of the process of cosmic evolution, but in antithetically op-
posed forms: at the lower end it is forced along the line of the most
probable for lack of freedom] at the upper end it is an ascent into the
improbable through the triumph of freedom.
We may be reassured. The vast industrial and social system by
which we are enveloped does not threaten to crush us, neither does
it seek to rob us of our soul. The energy emanating from it is free
not only in the sense that it represents forces that can be used: it is
moreover free because, in the whole no less than in the least of its
elements, it arises in a state that is ever more spiritualized. A
thinker such as Cournot 12 might still be able to suppose that the so-
cialized group degrades itself biologically in terms of the individ-
uals which comprise it. Only by reaching to the heart of the
Noosphere (we see it more clearly today) can we hope, and indeed
be sure, of finding, all of us together and each of us separately, the
fullness of our humanity.
REVUE DES QUESTIONS SCIENTIFIQUES ( LOU VAIN ),
JANUARY 1947, PP. 7-35.
12 Cournot, Considerations sur la Marche des idies et des fcvenements dans Us Temps mod-
ernes. (Rendition Mentre. Vol. II, p. 178).
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