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object:1.21 - FROM THE PRE-HUMAN TO THE ULTRA-HUMAN, THE PHASES OF A LIVING PLANET
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter


CHAPTER 21

FROM THE PRE-HUMAN TO

THE ULTRA-HUMAN: THE

PHASES OF A LIVING PLANET



astronomy is beginning to detect and clas-
sify in the heavens a life of the stars, red, blue and
white, giant, middle-sized and dwarf; each type, in
its dimensions, particular radiations and brilliance,
being subject to a given evolutionary cycle.

It is a matter of great interest; but have we
sometimes thought how much more interesting
and moving it would be if we could observe or at
least reconstruct the history, not of the glowing
suns in the heart of galaxies but of the mysterious
living planets? Celestial bodies such as these (they
undoubtedly exist as we shall see) give out no per-
ceptible radiation, or none that our present instru-
ments can detect. 1 We know nothing as yet of their
number, their distribution or their history. Our
study of them, in short, is restricted to a single
specimen, that of our own Earth, which is appar-
ently far from having attained its full development.

1 But is it inconceivable that there should some day be spec-
troscopes sensitive to some form of vital radiation?



FROM. THE PRE-HUMAN TO THE ULTRA-HUMAN 291

It is an unfavorable situation, but capable nevertheless of be-
ing put to use, since by means of the remarkable phenomena of
sedimentation and fossilization we can trace the biological past of
this planet over a period of nearly a thousand million years.

Using it as a representative example, though still unique in our
experience and probably "immature," let us seek to sketch on sci-
entific lines the probable evolutionary curve of any living planet; a
problem in which affective reasoning is singularly mingled with
speculation, since what we are looking for and seeking to extrapo-
late is nothing less than our own destiny

More than 600 million years ago the earth, like a nova of a sin-
gular kind, began to glow dimly with life. Under the influence of
solar radiation the sensitive film of its youthful waters became
charged in places with asymmetrical and multiplying proteins. We
do not know what caused this phenomenon, whether it was the
outcome of some sudden convulsion or of a long process of ripen-
ing What we do know is that this did indeed happen, and more-
over that of statistical necessity it could not have failed to happen,
given the physicochemical conditions prevailing on the planet that
bears us. However improbable in a mechanistic sense the elaborate
organic structure created by life may appear, it seems increasingly
evident that the cosmic substance is drawn toward these states of
extreme arrangement by a particular kind of attraction which
compels it, by the play of large numbers in which it is involved, to
miss no opportunity of becoming more complex and thus achiev-
ing a higher degree of freedom.

So we may assume that sporadically, in the course of time,
numerous centers of indeterminacy and consciousness can and
must have appeared in sidereal space, of which our own Earth is
one. Although Life by its structure seems in certain ways to be
highly exceptional, everything suggests that its pressure is exerted



292 THE FUTURE OF MAN

throughout the universe. And everything suggests that, wherever
cosmic hazard has enabled it to hatch out and establish itself, it
cannot thereafter cease to become intensified to the utmost, in ac-
cordance with an automatic process which may be analyzed as fol-
lows:

First, increase. Even in its lowest forms living matter, by its
physicochemical nature, possesses the extraordinary power of re-
producing itself indefinitely in a geometrical progression. For this
reason however minute and scattered the first patches of vitalized
proteins may have been, they could do no other than spread rap-
idly until they covered the entire surface of the planet; and their
expansion within a closed circle, after its initial unrestricted stage,
produced an increasing degree of compression. A gas under
mounting mechanical pressure as a rule changes its state. In the
same way a multitude of individuals, a living mass, being subjected
to pressure within an enclosed space, and to increasing biological
interpenetration, reacts by organizing itself upon itself: that is to
say, by seeking through selective experiment for the individual or
collective arrangements which best suit it, such arrangements be-
ing, in the event, those in which the degree of complexity is high-
est and therefore the state of indeterminacy the most advanced.

Many biologists, intent upon scientific objectivity are reluctant
to see in the historical development of terrestrial life anything
more than an unlimited proliferation of forms, all on the same
level. A steady increase of living creatures and living combinations,
they agree; but, despite this, not more life. What reason have we for
supposing that a mammal is more than a polypary?

Far more suggestive and convincing than this "flat" vision of
the biological world is the three-dimensional concept of a heavenly
body on which, through the effect of planetary compression, the
state of complexity (or, which amounts to the same thing, the "psy-



FROM. THE PRE-HUMAN TO THE ULTRA-HUMAN 293

chic" temperature of the biosphere) is continually rising. This
explains the supersession in successive stages of arthropods by ver-
tebrates, of pisciforms by tetrapods, and finally within the tetrapod
group, the progressive predominance of the mammals, gradually
forming their own primate strain, with the growth, globally irre-
versible and constantly accelerated along certain favored lines, of
"cerebration" from the beginning of life up to the present time.
The quantity and quality of cephalized nervous substance on
earth have indeed never been as great as they are today. This "or-
thogenetic" view of animal evolution is gradually becoming com-
mon ground among scientists; but it only achieves full validity, in
terms of my argument, to the extent that it implies a continuous
psychic "chain" going back to the beginning of life.

Looking back over the immense extent of geological time we
can see that the separate links in the chain have undergone no es-
sential change. It would seem that the principal factor making for
progress is still the operation of forces of natural selection, choos-
ing from outside the most successful and adaptable products of a
process of expansion that is disorderly in itself. Where, during the
course of time, an important transformation seems to have taken
place is at the level of the latest link in the chain, that of the "ac-
quirement of consciousness." For it is inevitable, by very reason of
the selective growth of psychism in the biosphere, that each new
higher element engendered by evolution must, to the extent that it
is more conscious, have a wider field of action. The mere fact of
its "ultra-cerebration" causes it to take up more room. So that the
compression of living matter, due in the first place simply to phys-
ical increase, is gradually heightened by its internal psychic expan-
sion. The chain coils in upon itself and the intensity of the
phenomenon tends to rise almost vertically Or to adopt another
image one might say that the "psychic tint" of the earth, studied at



294 THE FUTURE OF MAN

a great distance by some celestial observer, for two combined rea-
sons would be seen, in the course of eons of geological time, to be-
come gradually heightened in intensity until it reaches the
peculiarly moving moment of climax when, in a spread of more
active radiation covering Africa and southern Asia, a series of
sparks begins to glow, foreshadowing the incandescence which is
"hominization."

Closely related though he is to the other major primates,
among which he is biologically only one of a family, Man is psy-
chically distinguished from all other animals by the entirely new
fact that he not only knows, but knows that he knows. In him, for
the first time on earth, consciousness has coiled back upon itself to
become thought. To an observer unaware of what it signifies, the
event might at first seem to have little importance; but in fact it
represents the complete resurgence of terrestrial life upon itself. In
reflecting psychically upon itself Life positively made a new start.
In a second turn of the spiral, tighter than the first, it embarked for
a second time upon its cycle of multiplication, compression and in-
teriorization.

This is how the thinking layer of the earth as we know it today,
the Noosphere, came rapidly into being, proceeding from certain
centers of reflection which apparently emerged, at the threshold of
the Pleistocene period, somewhere in the tropical or subtropical
zones of the Ancient World 2 : a planetary neo-envelope, essentially
linked with the biosphere in which it has its root, yet distinguished
from it by an autonomous circulatory, nervous and, finally, cerebral
system. The Noosphere: a new stage for a renewed Life.

One may say that until the coming of Man it was natural se-
lection that set the course of morphogenesis and cerebration, but



2 i.e., in the place where, during the Upper Tertiary era, the group of the great
anthropoids was first established and subsequendy spread.



FROM THE PRE-HUMAN TO THE ULTRA-HUMAN 295

that after Man it is the power of invention that begins to grasp the
evolutionary reins. A wholly inward change, having no direct effect
on anatomy; but a change, as we now know, entailing two decisive
consequences for the future. The first is an unlimited increase in
the aura of influence radiating from every living being; the second,
even more radical, the prospect afforded to a growing number of
individuals of being joined together and ever more closely unani-
mized in the inextinguishable fire of research pursued in common.

From the Quaternary era onward Life has continued to su-
perdevelop itself, through Man, in the second degree. But although
this phenomenon is several hundred thousand years old, there are
growing indications that the process, far from slowing down, is now
entering upon a particularly accelerated and critical phase of its
development.

So far as we are able to follow its historical progress, the group-
ing and organization of the human mass has in the past been
broadly governed far more by the principle of expansion than by
that of compression. Diverse civilizations were able to grow and
rub shoulders on a sparsely inhabited planet without encountering
any major difficulty. But now, following the dramatic growth of in-
dustry, communications and populations in the course of a single
century, we can discern the outline of an astonishing event. The
hitherto scattered fragments of humanity, being at length brought
into close contact, are beginning to interpenetrate to the point of
reacting economically and psychically upon each other; with the
result, given the fundamental relationship between biological com-
pression and the heightening of consciousness, of an irresistible
rise within us and around us of the level of Reflection. Under the
influence of the forces compressing it within a closed vessel, hu-
man substance is beginning to "planetize" itself, that is to say, to be
interiorized and animated globally upon itself.

We may have supposed that the human species, being ma-



296 THE FUTURE OF MAN

tared, has reached the limit of its development. Now we see that it
is still in an embryonic state. Science can discern, in the hundreds of
thousands (or more probably millions) of years 3 lying ahead of the
Mankind we know, a deep if still obscure fringe of the "ultra-
human."

If this is so, and assuming that no sidereal accident interferes
with the course of events, how is the adventure likely to conclude?
Can we look forward to nothing but a state of senescence at the end
of the planetary cycle of hominization or, on the contrary, will it
be a paroxysm of the Noosphere?

The senescence theory finds immediate and natural support in
the fact of our individual ends. Since each separate thinking ele-
ment of the earth is destined to wither and die, why should the
sum total of them all, Mankind, be exempt from a similar fate?
This is the first thought that occurs to us: but is it sound? Is it cer-
tain that we can extrapolate the general evolutionary curve of the
species (phylogenesis) on the lines of the evolutionary pattern of
the individual (ontogenesis) without making any correction? Noth-
ing proves that we can, and there is a powerful argument against
it. For although certain principles of wear and disintegration,
which apparently cannot be prevented from growing more pro-
nounced with age, seem to be inherent in the structure of our in-
dividual bodies, there is no indication of any similar factor in the
global evolution of a living mass as large as the Noosphere, where
the overriding evolutionary law seems to be that of statistical ne-
cessity, it must simply converge upon itself.

The more deeply we study this distinction the more probable
does it seem that the human multitude is moving as time passes not

3 Since Mankind's behavior on the "tree of Life" is rather that of a flowering
than of an ordinary shoot, it is possible that the estimate of several million
years, based on the average longevity of animal forms, should be materially re-
duced to allow for the acceleration due to the totalization of the Noosphere.



FROM THE PRE-HUMAN TO THE ULTRA-HUMAN 297

toward any slackening but rather toward a superstate of psychic
tension. Which means that it is not any sluggishness of the spirit
that lies ahead of us, but on the contrary an eventual critical point
of collective reflexion. Not a gradual darkening but a sudden blaze
of brilliance, an explosion in which Thought, carried to the ex-
treme, is volatilized upon itself: such, if I had to bet on it, is how I
would depict the ultimate phase of a vitalized star.

But can even this, a supreme explosion, be considered a bio-
logically satisfactory culmination of the phenomenon of Man? It
is here that we encounter the very root of the problem proposed to
our scientific understanding by the existence of living planets.

In speaking of the rise of terrestrial psychic temperature I have
always assumed that in the Noosphere, as in the Biosphere, the
need and the will to grow both remain constant. There can be no
natural selection, still less reflective invention, if the individual is
not inwardly intent upon "superliving," or at least upon survival.
No evolutionary mechanism can have any power over a cosmic
matter if it is entirely passive, less still if it is opposed to it. But the
possibility has to be faced of Mankind falling suddenly out of love
with its own destiny. This disenchantment would be conceivable,
and indeed inevitable, if as a result of growing reflection we came
to believe that our end could only be collective death in an her-
metically sealed world. Clearly in face of so appalling a discovery
the psychic mechanism of evolution would come to a sudden stop,
undermined and shattered in its very substance, despite all the vi-
olent tuggings of the chain of planetary in-folding.

The more one considers this eventuality (which cannot be dis-
missed as a myth, as certain morbid symptoms, such as Sartrian
existentialism, show) the more does one tend to the view that the
grand enigma presented by the phenomenon of Man is not the
question of knowing how life was kindled on earth, but of under-
standing how it might be extinguished on earth without being



298 THE FUTURE OF MAN

continued elsewhere. Having once become reflective it cannot ac-
quiesce in its total disappearance without biologically contradict-
ing itself.

In consequence one is the less disposed to reject as unscientific
the idea that the critical point of planetary Reflection, the fruit of
socialization, far from being a mere spark in the darkness, repre-
sents our passage, by translation or dematerialization, to another
sphere of the Universe: not an ending of the Ultra-Human but its
accession to some sort of Trans-Human at the ultimate heart of
things.

PARIS, APRIL 27, 1950. ALMANACH DES SCIENCES, 1951.




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