object:1.22 - THE END OF THE SPECIES
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
CHAPTER 22
THE END OF
THE SPECIES
not MUCH more than a hundred years ago,
Man learned to his astonishment that there was an
origin of animal species, a genesis in which he
himself was involved. Not only did all kinds of an-
imals share the earth with him, but he found that
he was in some sort a part of this zoological di-
versity which hitherto he had regarded as being
merely his neighbors. Life was in movement, and
Mankind was the latest of its successive waves!
This astonishing pronouncement on the part
of science seemed at first to do no more than stim-
ulate the curiosity (or indignation) of theorists;
but it was soon apparent that the shock was not
purely mental, and that nineteenth-century man
had been shaken by it to his depths. Three hun-
dred years earlier, in the time of Galileo, the end of
geocentrism had intrigued or disturbed thinking
minds without having any appreciable effect on the
mass of people. The sidereal dispute had, after all,
300 THE FUTURE OF MAN
produced no change in the earth itself, or in its inhabitants or their
relations with one another. But the concept of biological evolution
inevitably led to a profound reshaping of planetary values.
To some outraged spirits, no doubt, Man appeared diminished
and dethroned by transformism which made him no more than the
latest arrival in the animal kingdom. But to the minds of the ma-
jority our human condition seemed finally to be exalted by the fact
that we were rooted in the fauna and soil of the planet — evolving
Man in the forefront of the animals.
In short, until then, Man, although he knew that the human
race might continue to exist for a long time, had not suspected that
it had a future. Now however, because he was a species, and species
change, he could begin to look for and seek to conquer something
quite new that lay ahead of him.
That is why "Darwinism," as it was then called, however naive
its beginnings, came at exactly the right moment to create the cos-
mological atmosphere of which the great technico-social advance
of the last century stood in need if it was to believe passionately in
what it was doing. Rudimentary though it was, Darwinism af-
forded a scientific justification of faith in progress.
but today, BY a development natural to itself, the movement
has come to look like a receding tide. For all his discoveries and in-
ventions, twentieth-century man is a sad creature. How shall we
account for his present dejected state except basically by the fact
that, following that exalted vision of species in growth, he is now
confronted by an accumulation of scientific evidence pointing to
the reverse — the species doomed to extinction?
The extinction of the species . . .
Biologists do not agree about the mechanism of the continual
THE END OF THE SPECIES 301
disappearance of phyla in the course of geological time, a process
almost as mysterious as that of their formation; but the reality of
the phenomenon is indisputable. Either the different species, losing
their powers of "speciation," survive as living fossils, which after all
is a form of death; or else, and there are infinitely more of these,
they simply vanish, one sort being replaced by another. Whatever
the reason may be, inadaptability to a new environment, competi-
tion, a mysterious senescence, or possibly a single basic cause un-
derlying all these reasons, the end is always the same. The days (or
the millennia) of every living form are by statistical reckoning in-
eluctably numbered; so much so that, using the scale of time
furnished by the study of certain isotopes, it is beginning to be pos-
sible to calculate in millions of years the average life of a species.
Man now sees that the seeds of his ultimate dissolution are at
the heart of his being. The End of the Species is in the marrow of our
bones!
Is it not this presentiment of a blank wall ahead, underlying all
sorts of tensions and specific fears, which paradoxically (at the very
moment when every barrier seems to be giving way before our
power of understanding and mastering the world) is darkening and
hardening the minds of our generation?
as psychiatry teaches us, we shall gain nothing by shutting
our eyes to this shadow of collective death that has appeared on
our horizon. On the contrary, we must open them wider.
But how are we to exorcise the shadow?
It may be said that timidly, even furtively (it is remarkable how
coy we are in referring to the matter) two methods are used by
writers and teachers to reassure themselves and others in face of
the ever more obsessive certainty of the eventual ending of the hu-
302 THE FUTURE OF MAN
man species: the first is to invoke the infinity of Time and the sec-
ond is to seek shelter in the depths of Space.
The Time argument is as follows. By the latest estimates of
palaeontology the probable life of a phylum of average dimensions
is to be reckoned in tens of millions of years. But if this is true of
"ordinary" species, what duration may we not look for in the case
of Man, that favored race which, by its intelligence, has succeeded
in removing all danger of serious competition and even in attack-
ing the causes of senescence at the root.
Then the Space argument. Even if we suppose that, by pro-
longing its existence on a scale of planetary longevity, the human
species will eventually find itself with a chemically exhausted Earth
beneath its feet, is not Man even now in process of developing as-
tronautical means which will enable him to go elsewhere and con-
tinue his destiny in some other corner of the firmament?
That is what they say, and for all I know there may be people
for whom this sort of reasoning does really dispel the clouds that
veil the future. I can only say that for my part I find such consola-
tions intolerable, not only because they do nothing but palliate and
postpone our fears, which is bad enough, but even more because
they seem to me scientifically false.
In order that the end of Mankind may be deferred sine die we
are asked to believe in a species that will drag on and spread itself
indefinitely; which means, in effect, that it would run down more
and more. But is not this the precise opposite of what is happen-
ing here and now in the human world?
I have been insisting for a long time on the importance and sig-
nificance of the technico-mental process which, particularly during
the past hundred years, has been irresistibly causing Mankind
to draw closer together and unite upon itself. From routine or prej-
udice the majority of anthropologists still refuse to see in this
movement of totalization anything more than a superficial and
THE END OF THE SPECIES 303
temporary side effect of the organic forces of biogenesis. Any par-
allel that may be drawn between socialization and speciation, they
maintain, is purely metaphorical. To which I would reply that, if
this is so, to what undisclosed form of energy shall we scientifically
attribute the irreversible and conjugated growth of Arrangement
and Consciousness which historically characterizes (as it does every-
thing else, in indisputably "biological" fields) the establishment of
Mankind on Earth?
We have only to go a little further, I am convinced, and our
minds, awakened at last to the existence of an added dimension,
will grasp the profound identity existing between the forces of civ-
ilization and those of evolution. Man will then assume his true
shape in the eyes of the naturalists — that of a species which hav-
ing entered the realm of Thought, henceforth folds back its
branches upon itself instead of spreading them. Man, a species
which converges, instead of diverging like every other species on
earth: so that we are bound to envisage its ending in terms of some
paroxysmal state of maturation which, by its scientific probability
alone must illumine for us all the darkest menaces of the future.
For if by its structure Mankind does not dissipate itself but
continually concentrates upon itself; in other words, if, alone
among all the living forms known to us, our zoological phylum
is laboriously moving toward a critical point of speciation, then are
not all hopes permitted to us in the matter of survival and irre-
versibility?
The end of a "thinking species": not disintegration and death,
but a new breakthrough and a rebirth, this time outside Time and
Space, through the very excess of unification and coreflexion. 1
1 Such coreflexion, as I am constantly obliged to say, in no way entailing a di-
minution but on the contrary an increase of the "person." Must I again repeat
the truth, of universal application, that if it be properly ordered union does not
confound but differentiates?
304 THE FUTURE OF MAN
It goes without saying that this idea of a salvation of the
Species sought, not in the direction of any temporo-spatial consol-
idation or expansion but by way of spiritual escape through the ex-
cess of consciousness, is not yet seriously considered by the
biologists. At first sight it appears fantastic. Yet if one thinks about
it long and carefully, it is remarkable how it sustains examination,
grows stronger and, for two particular reasons among others, takes
root in the mind.
For one thing, as I have said, it corresponds more closely than
any other extrapolation to the marked (even challenging) urgency
of our own time in the broad progress of the Phenomenon of
Man. But in addition it seems to be more capable than any other
vision of the future of stimulating and steadying our power of ac-
tion by counteracting the prevailing pessimism.
This is a fact which we must face.
In the present age, what does most discredit to faith in progress
(apart from our reticence and helplessness as we contemplate the
"end of the Race") is the unhappy tendency still prevailing among
its adepts to distort everything that is most valid and noble in our
newly aroused expectation of an "ultra-human" by reducing it to
some form of threadbare millennium. The believers in progress
think in terms of a Golden Age, a period of euphoria and abun-
dance; and this, they give us to understand, is all that Evolution has
in store for us. 2 It is right that our hearts should fail us at the
thought of so "bourgeois" a paradise.
We need to remind ourselves yet again, so as to offset this truly
pagan materialism and naturalism, that although the laws of bio-
genesis by their nature presuppose, and in fact bring about, an im-
provement in human living conditions, it is not well-being but a
2 I may cite, as an instance of this poverty of thought, the French film shelter-
ing behind so many famous names, La Vie Commence Demain.
THE END OF THE SPECIES 305
hunger for more-being which, of psychological necessity, can alone
preserve the thinking earth from the taedium vitae. And this makes
fully plain the importance of what I have already suggested, that it
is upon its point (or superstructure) of spiritual concentration, and
not on its basis (or infrastructure) of material arrangement, that
the equilibrium of Mankind biologically depends.
For if, pursuing this thought, we accept the existence of a crit-
ical point of speciation at the conclusion of all technologies and
civilizations, it means (with Tension maintaining its ascendancy
over Rest to the end in biogenesis) that an outlet appears at the peak
of Time, not only for our hope of escape but for our expectation
of some revelation.
And this is what can best allay the conflict between light and
darkness, exaltation and despair, in which, following the rebirth in
us of the Sense of the Species, we are now absorbed.
NEW YORK, DECEMBER 9, 1952. PSYCHE, FEBRUARY 1953-
NOTE BY FRENCH editor. Underlying this final testimony is
Teilhard de Chardin's earliest mystical intimation, set forth in Cos-
mic Life as early as 191 6. The following extracts from that work
show the unity of fundamental Christian vision and scientific
knowledge which he preserved to the end.
Cosmic Life 3
GOD cannot IN any way be intermixed with or lost in the par-
ticipated being which he sustains and animates and holds together,
3 Printed in full in Writings in Time of War, pp. 14-71. Collins, London and
Harper & Row, New York, 1968.
306 THE FUTURE OF MAN
but he is at the birth, and the growth and the final term of all
things . . .
The exclusive task of the world is the physical incorporation of
the faithful in the Christ who is of God. This cardinal task is being
carried out with the rigor and harmony of a natural evolution.
At the source of its developments an operation was called for,
transcendent in order, to graft the person of a God onto the hu-
man cosmos, under conditions that are mysterious but physically
governed . . . Et Verbum caro factum est. This was the Incarnation.
From this first and fundamental contact between God and the hu-
man race — which means in virtue of the penetration of the Divine
into our nature — a new life was born: an unlooked for magnifi-
cation and "obediental" extension of our natural capabilities —
grace . . . Grace is the unique sap that starts from the same trunk
and rises up into the branches, it is the blood that courses through
the veins under the impulse of one and the same Heart, the ner-
vous current that is transmitted through the limbs at the dictate of
one and the same Head: and that radiant Head, that mighty
Heart, that fruitful Stock, must inevitably be Christ . . .
The Incarnation is a making new, a restoration, of all the uni-
verse's forces and powers; Christ is the Instrument, the Center, the
End, of the whole of animate and material creation; through Him,
everything is created, sanctified and vivified. This is the constant and
general teaching of St. John and St. Paul (that most "cosmic" of
sacred writers), and it has passed into the most solemn formulas of
the Liturgy: and yet we repeat it, and generations to come will go
on repeating it, without ever being able to grasp or appreciate its
profound and mysterious significance, bound up as it is with un-
derstanding of the universe.
With the origin of all things, there began an advent of recol-
lection and work in the course of which the forces of determinism,
THE END OF THE SPECIES 307
obediently and lovingly, lent themselves and directed themselves in
the preparation of a Fruit that exceeded all hope and yet was
awaited. The world's energies and substances — so harmoniously
adapted and controlled that the supreme Transcendent would
seem to germinate entirely from their immanence — concentrated
and were purified in the stock of Jesse; from their accumulated and
distilled treasures they produced the glittering gem of matter, the
Pearl of the Cosmos, and the link with the incarnate personal Ab-
solute — the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen and Mother of all things,
the true Demeter . . . and when the day of the Virgin came to pass,
then the final purpose of the universe, deep-rooted and gratuitous,
was suddenly made clear: since the days when the first breath of
individualization passed over the expanse of the Supreme Center here
below so that in it could be seen the ripple of the smile of the orig-
inal monads, all things were moving toward the Child born of
Woman.
And since Christ was born, and ceased to grow, and died, every-
thing has continued in motion because he has not yet attained the fullness of his
form. He has not gathered about Him the last folds of the garment
of flesh and love woven for him by his faithful. The mystical Christ
has not reached the peak of his growth . . . and it is in the continuation
of this engendering that there lies the ultimate driving force be-
hind all created activity . . . Christ is the term of even the natural evo-
lution of living beings.
CONCLUSION
The End of the World
note BY French editor. To conclude these
writings on the Future of Man we quote the fol-
lowing extract from another work, My Universe}
Summarizing in a luminous synthesis the thinker
and priest's intimations of the End of the World, it
ends with the words of St. Paul, quoted on the last
page of Teilhard de Chardin's journal, which ex-
press his supreme vision: "God all in all." 2
. . . Forced against one another by the increase in
their numbers and the multiplication of their in-
terrelations — compressed together by the activa-
tion of a common force and the awareness of a
common distress — the men of the future will form,
in some way, but one single consciousness; and
since, once their initiation is complete they will
have gauged the strength of their associated
minds, the immensity of the universe, and the nar-
1 Printed in Science and Christ, pp. 83-5. Collins, London, and
Harper & Row, New York, 1968.
2 In Latin: Erit in omnibus omnia Dens. In Greek: En pasipanta
Theos. 1 Corinthians 15.28.
CONCLUSION 309
rowness of their prison, this consciousness will be truly adult and
of age. May we not imagine that at that moment a truly and to-
tally human act will be effected for the first time, in a final op-
tion — the yes or no as an answer to God, pronounced individually
by beings in each one of whom the sense of human freedom and
responsibility will have reached its full development?
It is by no means easy to picture to ourselves what sort of event
the end of the world could be. A sidereal catastrophe would be a
fitting counterpart to our individual deaths, but it would entail the
end of the earth rather than that of the cosmos — and it is the cos-
mos that has to disappear.
The more I think about this mystery, the more it appears to
me, in my dreams, as a "turning-about" of consciousness — as an
eruption of interior life — as an ecstasy. There is no need to rack
our brains to understand how the material vastness of the universe
will ever be able to disappear. Spirit has only to be reversed, to
move into a different zone, for the whole shape of the world im-
mediately to be changed.
When the end of time is at hand, a terrifying spiritual pressure
will be exerted on the confines of the real, built up by the desper-
ate efforts of souls tense with longing to escape from the earth.
This pressure will be unanimous. Scripture, however, tells us that
at the same time the world will be infected by a profound schism —
some trying to emerge from themselves in order to dominate the
world even more completely — others, relying on the words of
Christ, waiting passionately for the world to die, so that they may
be absorbed with it in God.
It is then, we may be sure, that the Parousia will be realized in a
creation that has been taken to the climax of its capacity for union.
The single act of assimilation and synthesis that has been going on
since the beginning of time will then at last be made plain, and the
universal Christ will blaze out like a flash of lightning in the storm
310 THE FUTURE OF MAN
clouds of a world whose slow consecration is complete. The trum-
pets of the angels are but a poor symbol. It will be impelled by the
most powerful organic attraction that can be conceived (the very
force by which the universe holds together) that the monads will join
in a headlong rush to the place irrevocably appointed for them by
the total adulthood of things and the inexorable irreversibility of the
whole history of the world — some, spiritualized matter, in the limit-
less fulfillment of an eternal communion — others, materialized
spirit, in the conscious torment of an endless decomposition.
At that moment, St. Paul tells us (i Cor. 15. 23 fi) when Christ
has emptied all created forces (rejecting in them everything that is a
factor of dissociation and superannuating all that is a force of
unity), he will consummate universal unification by giving himself,
in his complete and adult Body, with a finally satisfied capacity for
union, to the embrace of the Godhead.
Thus will be constituted the organic complex of God and
world — the Pleroma — the mysterious reality of which we cannot
say that it is more beautiful than God by himself (since God could
dispense with the world), but which we cannot, either, consider
completely gratuitous, completely subsidiary, without making Cre-
ation unintelligible, the Passion of Christ meaningless, and our ef-
fort completely valueless.
Et tunc erit finis.
Like a vast tide, Being will have engulfed the shifting sands of
being. Within a now tranquil ocean, each drop of which, neverthe-
less, will be conscious of remaining itself, the astonishing adventure
of the world will have ended. The dream of every mystic, the eter-
nal pantheist ideal, will have found its full and legitimate satisfac-
tion. "Erit in omnibus omnia Deus"
TIENTSIN, MARCH 25, 1924.
CONCLUSION
311
Conclusion
NOTE BY FRENCH EDITOR. Three days before his death Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin wrote the following, which constitutes his
supreme testimony as a thinker and a priest.
Last Page of the Journal of Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin
Maundy Thursday.
What I believe.
i St. Paul — the three verses: En pasi panta Theos.
Christogenesis.
The three verses are i Corinthians 15. 26, 27 and 28:
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all
312 THE FUTURE OF MAN
things are put under him, it is manifest that he is expected, which
did put all things under him.
And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the
Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him,
that God may be all in all.
april 7, 1955
INDEX
Above, and Ahead, 262ff.
acquired characteristics,
man: biological perfection of, 138;
as convergent species, 303; as
fruit of progress, 59; phyletic
development of, 29; psychic
immaturity of, 262; relationship
with universe, 6f.; significance
on earth, 104, i05f; uniqueness
of, 79, i44f.
values: contemporary problem of,
31; personal, 44; within animal
kingdom, 215
variable, change of, 105
Venus, 115
Vernadsky, Wladimir, 15 m.
viruses, 99, 123
vision, heightening of, 22yf.
war, effect of atomic power on,
140
Wells, H. G., 288
white dwarfs, 92, 101
whole, discovery of, 7
willpower, 8
will to survive, 174
withdrawal, 35, 41
"within," 123
World War H, 90E, no, ngf., 184,
249
worship, 266
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN (1881-1955)
was a philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest.
Born in France, educated in Jesuit schools, and or-
dained in 191 1, he journeyed to various parts of the
world on geological and paleontological expedi-
tions and published several works on science. His
renowned works, The Phenomenon of Man and The
Divine Milieu, were published shortly after his death
and today are regarded as classics of Catholic the-
ology
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