object:2.01 - THE ADVENT OF LIFE
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter
BOOK TWO
LIFE
74
CHAPTER ONE
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
After what wc have said about the latent germinal powers of
the early earth, it might be thought that nothing had been left in
nature which could pin-point the beginning of life, and that there-
fore my chapter heading is inappropriate. The mineral world and
the world of life seem two antithetical creations when viewed by
a summary glance in their extreme forms and on the intermediary
scale of our human organisms ; but to a deeper study, when we
force our way right down to the microscopic level and beyond to
the infinitesimal, or (which comes to the same thing) far back
along the scale of time, they seem quite odierwise — a single mass
gradually melting in on itself.
At such depths all differences seem to become tenuous. For
a long time we have known how impossible it is to draw a clear
line between animal and plant on the unicellular level. Nor can
we draw one (as we shall see later) between ' living ' protoplasm
and ' dead ' proteins on the level of the very big molecular
accumulations. We still use the word ' dead ' for these latter
unclassified substances, but have we not already come to the
conclusion that they would be incomprehensible if they did not
possess already, deep down in themselves, some sort of rudi-
mentary psyche ?
So, in a sense, we can no more fix an absolute zero in time (as
was once supposed) for the advent of life than for that of any
other experimental reality. On the experimental and phenomeno-
logical plane, a given universe and each of its parts can only have
one and the same duration, to which there is no backward limit.
77
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
Thus each thing extends itself and pushes its roots into the past,
ever farther back, by that which makes it most itself. Everything,
in some extremely attenuated extension of itself, has existed from
the very first. Nothing can be done in a direct way to counter
this basic condition of our knowledge.
But to have realised and accepted once and for all that each
new being has and must have a cosmic etnbryogenesis in no way
invalidates the reality of its historic birth.
In every domain, when anything exceeds a certain measure-
ment, it suddenly changes its aspect, condition or nature. The
curve doubles back, the surface contracts to a point, the solid
disintegrates, the liquid boils, the germ cell divides, intuition
suddenly bursts on the piled up facts . . . Critical points have been
reached, rungs on the ladder, involving a change of state — jumps
of all sorts in the course of development. Henceforward this is
the only way in which science can speak of a ' first instant '.
But it is none the less a true way.
In this new and more complicated sense — even after (precisely
after) what we have said about pre-lifc — our task, now, is to
consider and define a beginning of life.
Through a duration to which we can give no definite measure
but know to be immense, the earth, cool enough now to allow
the formation on its surface of the chains of molecules of the car-
bon type, was probably covered by a layer of water from which
emerged the first traces of future continents. To an observer
equipped with even the most modern instruments of research,
our earth would probably have seemed an inanimate desert. Its
waters would have left no trace of mobile particles even upon the
finest of our filters, and the most powerful microscope would
only liave detected inert aggregates.
Then at a given moment, after a sufficient lapse of time, those
same waters here and there must unquestionably have begun
writhing with nunutc creatures. And from that initial prolifera-
tion stemmed the amazing profusion of organic matter whose
matted complexity came to form the last (or rather the last but
one) of the envelopes of our planet : the biosphere.
7«
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
No amount of historical research will ever reveal the details
of this story. Unless the science of tomorrow is able to recon-
struct the process in the laboratory, we shall probably never find
any material vestige of this emergence of the microscopic from
the molecular, of the organic from the chemical, of the living
from the prc-living. One thing is certain, however — a meta-
morphosis of tills sort could not be the result of a simple con-
tinuous process. By analogy with all we have learnt from the
comparative study of natural developments, we must postulate at
this particular moment of terrestrial evolution a coming to matur-
ity, a threshold, a crisis of the first magnitude, the beginning of a
new order.
We shall now try to determine what must have been on the
one hand the nature, on the other the spatial and temporal
modalities of this transformation ; and find an explanation that
will fit in both with what we presume to have been the conditions
on die early earth and with those of the earth as it is today.
i. THE TRANSIT TO LIFE
Seen from outside and materially, the best we can say at the
moment is that life properly speaking begins with the cell. For a
century science has concentrated its attention on tlus chemically
and structurally ultra-complex unit, and the longer it continues
to do so the more evident it becomes that in it lies the secret of
which we have as yet no more than an inkling — the secret of the
connection between the two worlds of physics and biology. The
cell is the natural granule oj lijc in the same way as the atom is
the natural granule of simple, elemental matter. If we are to take
the measure of the transit to life and determine its precise nature,
we must try to understand the cell.
But to understand it, how are we to regard it ?
Volumes have been written about the cell. Whole libraries
are insufficient to contain all that has been meticulously observed
concerning its texture, the functions of its ' cytoplasm ' and
79
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
nucleus, the way it divides, and its connection with heredity. Yet,
in itself, it is still a closed book, still as enigmatic as ever. It seems
as though, once we have reached a certain depth in our explana-
tion, we find ourselves reduced to marking time in front of an
impregnable fortress.
It might seem that the histological and physiological methods
of analysis have given us all we could expect of them and that,
to get any farther, our approach must be made from another
angle.
For obvious reasons, cytology has so far proceeded with an
almost exclusively biological oudook. The cell has been viewed
as a micro-organism, or an example of proto-life, that must be
interpreted in relation to its highest forms and associations.
But this attitude has left half our problem in the dark. Like the
moon in its first quarter, the cclJ has been illumined only on the
side that looks towards the highest forms of life, leaving the odier
side (the layers we have called pre-life) floating in darkness. That
is most likely the reason scientifically speaking why its mystery
has been so unduly prolonged.
Marvellous as it is, marvellous as it seems to us in its isolation
among the other constructions of matter, the cell, like everything
else in the world, cannot be understood (i.e. incorporated in a
coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolu-
tionary line between a past and a future. We have turned a good
deal of attention to its development and its differentiations. It is
on its origins, that is to say on its roots in the inorganic, that we
must now focus our researches if we want to grasp the essence of
its novelty.
Despite what experience has taught us in every other field, we
have let ourselves become too much accustomed to thinking of
the cell as an object without antecedents. Let us see what happens
if wc regard it and treat it (as we certainly should) as something
at one and the same time both the outcome of long preparation and
yet profoundly original, that is to say, as a thing that is born.
80
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
A. Micro-organisms and Mega-molecules
First of all the preparatory process.
When we try to look at the beginning of life in relation to its
antecedents rather than its consequents, we at once notice some-
thing which, strangely enough, had never struck us before. It is
in and by means of the cell that the molecular world ' appears in
person ' (if I may so express myself), touching, passing into, and
disappearing in the higher constructions of life.
Perhaps a word of explanation is needed.
"When we look at bacteria, it is always against a background
of the higher plants and animals, and this blinds our vision. What
we should do is start from another angle, shutting our eyes to all
the more advanced forms in living nature and even to most of the
protozoa because, in their main lines, they are almost as differen-
tiated as metazoa. In the latter, moreover, let us ignore the highly
specialised and often very large cells of the nervous, muscular and
reproductive systems. In other words let us confine ourselves to
the more or less independent elements, externally amorphous or
polymorphous, such as abound in natural ferments, are present
in our blood and accumulate in our organs in the form of con-
nective tissue, in other words let us confine ourselves to what
appear the simplest and the most primitive cells in nature today.
This done, let us look at this corpuscular mass in relation to the
matter beneath it. Can we fail for a moment to see the obvious
relationship, in both composition and appearance, between the
proto-living world on the one hand and the physico-chemical
one on the other? When we consider the simplicity of the cellular
form, the structural symmetry, the infinitesimal size, the outer
uniformity in character and behaviour in the mass or multitude,
do we not find the unmistakable characteristics and habits of the
granular formations ? In other words, we are still on that first rung
of life, if not at the heart of ' matter ', at least fully on its border.
Without exaggeration it may be said that just as man, seen in
terms of palaeontology, merges anatomically with the mass of
81
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
mammals that preceded him, so, probing backwards, we sec the cell
merging qualitatively and quantitatively with the world of
chemical structures. Followed in a backward direction, it visibly
converges towards the molecule.
This is already somediing more than a simple intellectual
intuition.
Only a few years ago what I have just said concerning the
gradual conversion of the ' granule ' of matter into the ' granule '
of life might have been thought of as being as suggestive, but at
the same time as unfounded, as the first dissertations of Darwin or
Lamarck on evolution. But things are now changing. Since the
days of Darwin and Lamarck, numerous discoveries have estab-
lished the existence of the transitional forms postulated by the
theory of evolution. At the same time the latest advances in bio-
chemistry arc beginning to establish the reality of molecular
aggregates which really do appear to reduce to measurable
proportions the gaping void hitherto supposed to exist between
protoplasm and mineral matter. If certain calculations (admittedly
indirect) are accepted as correct, the molecular weights of some
of the natural proteinous substances (such as the viruses so
mysteriously associated with the zymotic diseases in plants and
animals) may well be in terms of millions. Much smaller than any
bacteria — so small in fact that no filter can retain them — the
particles forming these substances are none the less colossal
compared with the molecules normally dealt with in organic
chemistry. It is fruitful to note that if we cannot yet consider
them cells, some of their properties (particularly their faculty of
multiplying in contact with living tissue) detinitely foreshadow
those of proper organic beings. 1
Thanks to the discovery of these giant corpuscles the foreseen
1 Since the viruses have now become visible under the powerful magnifica-
tion of the electron microscope in the form of fine rods asymmetrically active
at their two extremities, the opinion has gained ground that we should include
them among bacteria rather than among ' molecules '. But then, surely, the
study of enzymes and other complex chemical substances is beginning to
reveal that molecules have zjorm and even a great variety of forms.
82
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
existence of intermediate states between the microscopic living
world and the ultra-microscopic ' inanimate ' one has now passed
into the field of direct experimentation.
So from now on we are justified not only by our intellectual
need of continuity but by positive indications when we state that,
in accordance with our theoretical anticipation of the reality of a
pre-life, some natural function really does link the mega-mole-
cular to the micro-organic both in the sequence of their appear-
ance and in their present existence.
And this preliminary finding takes us another step towards a
better understanding of the preparations for, and hence the origins
of, life.
B. A Forgotten Era
I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the
well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics. But, as a
naturalist, I am obliged to recognise that the assumption of a
dimensional milieu in which space and time are organically com-
bined is the only way we have found to explain the distribution
around us of animate and inanimate substances. Indeed the further
we advance in our knowledge of the natural history of the world,
the more clearly we realise that the distribution of objects and
forms at any given moment can only be explained by a process
whose duration in time varies directly with the spatial (or morpho-
logical) dispersion of the objects in question. Every distance in
space, every morphological deviation, presupposes and expresses
a duration.
Let us take the very simple case of existing vertebrates. In
the time of Linnaeus the classification of these animals had advanced
sufficiently for them to be arranged in a definite structure of
orders, families, genera etc. Yet the naturalists of the day were
unable to provide any scientific explanation of this system. Wc
know now that the system of Linnaeus merely represents a
present-day cross-section of a diverging bundle of phyla 1 emerging
1 [Throughout this work, the author uses the word phylum in its looser
sense for a zoological branch regardless of dimension.]
83
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
one after the other through the centuries. 1 Accordingly the
zoological separation of living creatures into different types
reveals and measures in each case a difference in age. In the
constellation of species, everything which exists and the place
which it occupies implies a certain past, a certain genesis. In
particular every time the zoologist meets a more primitive type
than those he is familiar with (take the amphioxus, for example)
the result is not merely to extend by one more unit the range of
animal forms: no, a discovery of that sort ipso facto implies
another stage, verticil, or ring on the tree-trunk of evolution. For
the amphioxus we can only find a place in the present animal
kingdom by supposing a whole ' proto-vertcbrate ' stage of life
in the past, coming somewhere beneath the fishes.
In the biologist's space-time, the introduction of a new morpho-
logical end-form or stage needs immediately to be translated by a
correlative prolongation of the axis of duration.
Keeping this principle in mind, let us return to these astonish-
ing giant molecules detected by recent science.
It is possible, though unlikely, that these enormous particles
form in nature today no more than an exceptional and relatively
restricted group. But however rare they may be, and however
modified by secondary association with the living tissue they
batten on parasitically, we have no right whatever to treat them
as monstrosities or aberrant forms. On the contrary, everything
points to their being representative forms, even if only as a
surviving residue of some particular stage in the construction
of terrestrial matter.
Thus, between our cellular zone and our molecular zone,
hitherto supposed adjacent, another, the mega-molecular zone,
has now insinuated itself. And at the same time, because of the
close relation we have established between space and duration,
an additional period must accordingly be inserted at some point
far behind us in the history of the earth. Another circle on the
trunk of the tree means another interval of time in the life of the
1 Sec what I have to say on this subject in the next chapter, section 3, The
Tree of Life.
84
THE ADVENT OP LIFE
universe. The discovery of viruses and other similar elements not
only adds another and important term to our series of states and
forms of matter; it obliges us to interpolate a hitherto forgotten
era (an era of sub-life) in the series of ages that measure the past
of our planet.
Accordingly, working down from incipient life, we find
once again in a clearly defined terminal form that phase and that
aspect of the early earth which we were led to suppose earlier on
when we were climbing the ladder of multiple elements.
Naturally we are not yet in a position to say anything definite
concerning the length of time required for the establishment of
the mega-molecular world. But though we cannot put it into
figures, there are nevertheless some considerations to help us to
form an idea of its order of magnitude. Here are three reasons
among others for believing the process to have been one of the
utmost slowness.
In the first place ; its appearance and development must have
been narrowly dependent on the transformation of the general
conditions, chemical and thermal, prevailing on the surface of the
planet. In contrast to life, which seems to have spread with an
inherent speed in practically stable material surroundings, the
mega-moleculcs must have developed according to the earth's
sidereal rhythm, i.e. incredibly slowly.
Secondly, the transformation, once begun, must have extended
to a mass of matter sufficiently important and sufficiently large
to constitute a zone or envelope of telluric dimensions before it
could form the necessary basis for the emergence of life. That,
too, must have taken a very long time.
Thirdly, mega-molecules seem to show traces of a long
history. How could we possibly imagine them forming suddenly,
like the simpler corpuscles, and remaining so once and for alt?
Their complication and their instability, rather like those of life,
both suggest a long process of gradual accretions over a series of
generations.
For these three reasons, we may now hazard the guess that the
duration required for the formation of proteins on the surface of
85
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
the earth was as long as, perhaps longer than, the whole of geo-
logical time from the Cambrian period to the present day.
And so the abyss of the past is deepened by yet another level
or layer ; and though our incurable intellectual weakness en-
courages us to compress it into an ever thinner slice of duration,
scientific analysis is constantly forcing us to enlarge it.
' This gives us the sort of basis we need for the views which
follow.
Without a long period for maturing no profound change can
take place in nature. On the other hand, granted such a period, it
is inevitable that something quite new should be produced. A
terrestrial era of the mega-molecule is not merely a supplementary
period added to our schedule of durations. For something much
more than that is involved, namely the requirement of a critical
point which concludes and closes it. Which is exactly what
we need to justify the idea that an evolutionary break of the first
order must have taken place with the appearance of the first cells.
But in what way can we envisage the nature of this break ?
c. The Cellular Revolution
a. External Revolution. From an external point of view, which is
the ordinary biological one, the essential originality of the cell
seems to have been the discovery of a new method of agglomera-
ting a larger amount of matter in a single unit. This discovery
was doubdess prepared over a long period by the tentative
gropings in the course of which the mega-molecules gradually
emerged ; but for all that it was sufficiently sudden and revolu-
tionary to have immediately enjoyed prodigious success in the
natural world.
We are still a long way from being able to define die basic
principle of cellular organisation, though it is probably clarity
itself. We have, however, learnt enough to be able to estimate the
extraordinary complexity of its structure and the no less extra-
ordinary fixity of its fundamental type.
86
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
First the complexity. Chemistry teaches us that the cellular
edifice is based on albuminoids, nitrogenous organic substances
(amino acids) of enormous molecular weight (up to 10,000 and
over). In combination with fats, water, phosphorus, and all sorts
of mineral salts (potassium, sodium, magnesium, and various
metallic compounds) these albuminoids constitute a ' proto-
plasm ', a sponge made up of innumerable particles in which
come appreciably into play the forces of viscosity, osmosis, and
catalysis which characterise matter when molecular groupings
have reached an advanced stage. And that is not all. In the centre
of this agglomeration a nucleus containing ' chromosomes ' may
generally be seen against the background of the surrounding
' cytoplasm ', perhaps itself composed of fine rods or filaments
(' mitochondria '). With the increased powers of the microscope
and advances in the use of stains, new structural elements continue
to appear in the complex (whether in height or depth). We find
a triumph of multiplicity organically contained within a mini-
mum of space.
Next the fixity. As we have already pointed out, indefinite
as are the possible modulations of the fundamental theme, in-
exhaustible as are the various forms it assumes in nature, the cell
remains in all cases essentially true to itself. Looking at it, we
hesitate to compare it to anything either in the world of the
' animates ' or that of die ' inanimates '. Yet cells still seem to
resemble one another more as molecules do than as animals do.
We are right to look on them as the first of living forms. But are
we not equally entided to view diem as the representatives of
another state of matter, something as original in its way as the
electronic, the atomic, the crystalline, or the polymerous ? As a
new type of material for a new stage of the universe ?
In this cell (at the same time so single, so uniform and so
complex) what we have is really the stuff of the universe re-
appearing once again with all its characteristics — only this time
it has reached a higher rung of complexity and thus, by the same
stroke (if our hypothesis be well founded), advanced still further
in inferiority, i.e. in consciousness.
87
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
b. Internal Revolution. It is generally accepted that we must
assume psychic life to ' begin ' in the world with the first appear-
ance of organised life, in other words, of the cell. I am thus at one
with current views and ways of stating them when I assume a
decisive step in the progress of consciousness on earth to have
taken place at this particular stage of evolution.
But since I have admitted a much earlier origin (a primordial
one in fact) to the first lineaments of immanence within matter,
it is incumbent on me to explain in what specific way the internal
(' radial ') energy is modified to correspond with the external
(' tangential ') constitution of the cellular unit. If we have
already endowed the long chain of atoms, then molecules, then
mega-molecules, with the obscure and remote sources of a rudi-
mentary free activity, it is not by a totally new beginning but by a
metamorphosis that the cellular revolution should express itself
psychically. But how ? How are we to envisage the change-over
(how are wc even to find room for a change-over) from the pre-
consciousness inherent in pre-life to the consciousness, however
elementary, of the first true living creature ? Are there several
ways for a creature to have a within ?
It is not easy, I must confess, to be clear on this point. Later on,
in the case of thought, a psychical definition of the ' human
critical point ' will emerge almost at once, because the direshold
of reflection bears in itself something definitive and also because
we have only to consult our own deeper selves to measure it. If,
on the other hand, we wish to compare the cell with its pre-
decessors, introspection can only help us through repeated and
remote analogies. What do we know of the ' souls ' of animals,
even of those nearest to ourselves ? At such distances downward
and backward we must resign ourselves to being vague in our
speculations.
At grips with this obscurity and marginal approximation, wc
are nevertheless able to make at least three possible observations —
which are enough to fix in a useful and coherent way the position
of the cellular awakening in the series of psychical transformations
preparing the advent on earth of the phenomenon of man.
88
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
Even if we accept that a sort of rudimentary consciousness
precedes the emergence of life, especially if we accept it, such an
awakening or jump (i) could, or, better, (ii) was bound to, happen,
and hence (iii) we have a partial explanation for one of the most
extraordinary renewals which the face of the earth has under-
gone historically.
In the first place it is quite conceivable that an essential change-
over between two states or forms of consciousness, even on the
lower levels, can happen. To return to and change round in its
very terms the doubt formulated above, I would say there were a
good many ways for a being to have a ' within '. A closed surface,
irregular at first, may become centred. A circle can augment its
order of symmetry and become a sphere. Either by arrangement
of the parts or by the acquisition of another dimension, the degree
of interiority ' of a cosmic element can undoubtedly vary to the
point at which it rises suddenly on to another level.
Now that precisely such a psychic mutation must have
accompanied the discovery of cellular combination follows
directly from the law accepted above as regulating the mutual
relations of the within and the without of things. The increase of
the synthetic state of matter involves, we said, a corresponding
increase of consciousness for the milieu synthesiscd. To which we
should now add : the critical change in the intimate arrangement
of the elements induces ipso facto a change of nature in the state of
consciousness of the particles of the universe.
And now, in the light of these principles, let us look once
again at the astounding spectacle displayed by the definitive
budding of life on the surface of the early earth ; at the thrust
forward in spontaneity ; at the luxuriant unleashing of fanciful
creations ; at the unbridled expansion and the leap into the im-
probable. Surely the explosion of internal energy consequent upon
and proportioned to a fundamental super-organisation of matter is
precisely the event which our theory could have led us to expect.
Such an external realisation of an essentially new type of
corpuscular grouping, allowing the more supple and better
centred organisation of an unlimited number of substances at all
89
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
and, simultaneously, the internal onset of a new type of conscious
activity and determination : this double and radical metamor-
phosis allows us reasonably to define, in regard to what is speci-
fically original in it, the critical passage from the molecule to the
cell — the transit to life.
Before considering the subsequent evolutionary consequences
of this transit, we must look a little closer into the conditions of
its historical realisation— firsdy in space, and secondly in time.
That is the object of the two sections which follow.
2. THE INITIAL MANIFESTATIONS OF LIFE
Because the apparition of the cell was an event which took place
on the frontiers of the infinitesimal, and because the elements
involved were delicate in the extreme, now absorbed in sediments
transformed long ago, there is no chance, as I have said already, of
our ever finding traces of it. Thus at the outset we come up
against that fundamental condition to which experience is subject,
by virtue of which the beginnings of all things tend to be mater-
ially out of our grasp. This is a law running right through history
which we shall later be calling the ' automatic suppression of
evolutionary peduncles '.
Fortunately there are a number of different ways in which our
minds can reach reality. What escapes the intuition of our senses
we can encircle and define approximately by a series of indirect
attacks. Let us follow this more roundabout method, the only one
at our disposal when we try to picture new-born life. We can do
so by stages in the following manner.
a. The Milieu
Wc must start by going back perhaps a thousand million years
and wipe out the greater part of those material superstructures
which form the features of the earth's surface today. Geologists
90
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
are far from being agreed upon what our planet looked like at
that distant period. I am inclined myself to picture it as enveloped
in a shoreless ocean (of which the Pacific is perhaps a vestige)
through which, at a few isolated points, protuberances of future
continents had begun to emerge by volcanic eruption. Those
waters were doubtless warmer than our seas today and also more
fraught with free valencies that succeeding ages were gradually
to absorb and stabilise. It was in such a liquid, heavy and active
— at all events it was inevitably in a liquid environment—
that the first cells must have formed. Let us try to distinguish
them.
At this distance of time their form can only be vaguely sur-
mised. By analogy with what we must assume to be their least
altered traces today, the best we can do is to imagine this prim-
ordial generation in terms of granules of protoplasm, with or
without an individually differentiated nucleus. But if the outline
and individual structure remain inscrutable, certain characteristics
of another order stand out sharply and lose none of their value
because they are quantitative. I am referring to their incredible
smallness and — natural consequence — their bewildering number.
B. Smallness and Number
Having reached this point we must force ourselves to make one of
those ' efforts to see ' that I mentioned in my Foreword. We can
look at the night sky year in year out without ever once making a
real effort to apprehend the distances and thus the vast size of the
sidereal masses. Similarly our eyes may be familiar with the field
of vision of a microscope without our ever ' realising ' the dis-
concerting dimensional hiatus which separates the world of man-
kind from that of a drop of water. We can speak with accuracy
about creatures measurable in hundredths of a millimetre, but
have we ever attempted to transplant them mentally seeing them
on their own scale in our framework ? Yet this effort at per-
spective is indispensable if we wish to probe the secrets or even
91
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
the * space ' of nascent life which can of course be nothing else
than a granular life.
That the first cells were infinitesimal there can be no doubt.
That is determined by their originating out of mega-molecules.
It is also established visually when we examine the simplest forms
of life that we can find still today in the world. When we finally
lose sight of bacteria they are no more than one five-thousandth
of a millimetre long.
And there seems positively to be in the universe a natural
relationship between size and number. Either because they are
faced with a relatively greater space or else to compensate for
their reduced effective radius of individual action, the smaller
creatures are the more they swarm. Measurable only in terms
of microns, the first cells must have been numbered by the myriad.
Hence as we get as near as we can to the threshold of life, it
manifests itself to us simultaneously as microscopic and innumerable.
There is nothing in this which should surprise us. Surely it is
natural that life, as it just emerges from matter, should be ' drip-
ping with molecularity \
What we need now is to understand how the organic world
works and what is its future. On the bottom rung of that ladder
we find number, an immense number. How are we to picture
the historical modalities and the evolutive structure of this native
multiplicity ?
c. The Origin of Number
From our remote standpoint it may be said that life no sooner
started than it swarmed.
To explain and make clear the nature of this multiplicity from
the very beginning of animate evolution, two lines of thought
suggest themselves.
First of all we can assume that, though they only occurred in
the first instance at a single point or a small number of points, the
first cells multiplied almost instantaneously— as crystallisation
92
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
spreads in a super-saturated solution. For surely the early earth
was in a state of biological super-tension.
Or, on the other hand, we can equally well suppose that the
passage from mega-molecule to cell took place simultaneously
at a great many points, the requisite conditions of instability being
widespread. Just as, in the case of mankind, great discoveries are
often simultaneous.
Was the origin of cells ' monophyletic ' or ' polyphyletic ' ?
Was this advance in the first instance simple and narrow but
broadening outwards with extreme rapidity, or on the contrary
relatively broad and complex from the first and subsequently
spreading more slowly ? Which is the most suitable way of
imagining the beginnings of the bundle of living beings ?
All through the story of the organisms, at the start of each
zoological group, we meet the same problem — single thread or
multiple strand ? And just because the beginnings are always
beyond the reach of direct vision, we constandy face the same
difficulty of choosing between two hypotheses which are almost
equally plausible. This hesitation worries and irritates us.
But do we really need to choose — here at any rate ? However
slender we may suppose it, the initial peduncle of terrestrial life
must have contained an appreciable number of fibres rooted in the
enormity of the molecular world. Conversely, however broad
we imagine its section, it must, like all nascent physical realities,
have enjoyed an exceptional aptitude to branch out into new
forms. Fundamentally the two perspectives differ only in the
relative importance attributed to one or other of the two factors
(initial complexity and ' expansiveness ') present in both cases.
Both, moreover, imply a close relationship of an evolutive kind
between the first living objects on the early earth. So, ignoring
their secondary conflicts, let us concentrate on the essential fact
on which they both cast light. This, in my opinion, may be
expressed as follows :
From whatever angle we look at it, the nascent cellular world
shows itself to be already infinitely complex. Either on account
of its multiple origin, or because of its rapid variegation from a
93
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
very few points of emergence, or again, we must add, because of
regional differences (climatic or chemical) in the earth's watery
envelope, we are led to envisage life on the protocellular level as
an enormous bundle of polymorphous fibres. Already and even
at these depths the phenomenon of life cannot be really under-
stood except as an organic problem of masses in movement.
An organic problem of masses or multitudes and not a simple
statistical problem of large numbers : what does that difference
imply ?
D. Inter-relationship and Shape
Once more, but now on the collective scale, we arc faced with the
frontier between the physical and the biological worlds. As
long as wc were dealing with churning atoms or molecules we
could be content with the numerical laws of probability when
working out the behaviour of matter. But from the moment
when the monad acquires the dimensions and superior spontaneity
of a cell, and tends to be individualised at the heart of a pleiad, a
more complicated pattern appears in the stuff of the universe.
On two counts at least it would be inadequate and false to imagine
life, even taken in its granular stage, as a fortuitous and amorphous
proliferation.
Firstly the initial mass of the cells must from the start have
been inwardly subjected to a sort of inter-dependence which went
beyond a mere mechanical adjustment, and was already a begin-
ning of ' symbiosis ' or life-in-common.
However tenuous it was, the first veil of organised matter
spread over the earth could neither have established nor main-
tained itself without some network of influences and exchanges
which made it a biologically cohesive whole. From its origin, the
cellular nebula necessarily represented, despite its internal multi-
plicity, a sort of diffuse super-organism. Not merely a foam of
lives but, to a certain extent, itself a living film. A simple re-
appearance, after all, in more advanced form and on a higher
level of those much older conditions which we have already seen
94
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
presiding over the birth and equilibrium of the first polymerised,
substances on the surface of the early earth. A simple prelude
too, to the much more advanced evolutionary solidarity, so
marked in the higher forms of life, whose existence obliges us
increasingly to admit the strictly organic nature of the links
which unite them in a single whole at the heart of the biosphere.
Secondly (and this is more surprising) the innumerable
elements composing at the outset the living film of the earth do
not seem to have been taken or collected exhaustively and hap-
hazard. Their admission into this primordial envelope gives
rather the impression of having been mysteriously guided by a
previous selection or dichotomy. Biologists have noted that,
according to the chemical group to which they belong, the mole-
cules incorporated into living matter are all asymmetrical in the
same way, that is to say if a pencil of polarised light is passed
through them they all turn the plane of the beam in the same
direction — either they are all right-rotating or all left-rotating
according to the group taken. More remarkable still, all living
creatures, from the humblest bacteria to man, contain exactly the
same complicated types of vitamins and enzymes, notwithstand-
ing the great range of chemical forms possible; just as the higher
mammals are all ' tritubercular ' and walking vertebrates all four-
footed. Surely such similarity of living substance in dispositions
which do not seem necessary suggests an early choice or sorting.
This chemical uniformity of protoplasm at accidental points has
been taken as proof that all existing organisms descend from a
single ancestral group (the case of the crystal falling in the super-
saturated solution). Without going as far as that, we may say
that all it establishes is a certain initial cleavage (between right-
rotating and left-rotating examples, for instance, whichever it
may be) in the enormous mass of carbon matter at the threshold
of life (instance of the discovery in n points at once). In any event,
it is not important. The interesting thing is that on cither assump-
tion the living world assumes the same curious appearance of a
totality re-formed from a partial group : whatever may have
been the complexity of its original impetus, it exhausts only a
95
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
part of what might have been. Taken as a whole, the biosphere
would thus represent only a simple branch within and above other
less progressive or less fortunate proliferations of pre-life. And
surely this amounts to saying that, considered globally, the appear-
ance of the first cells gives rise to the same problems as do the
origins of each of those later stems we call ' phyla '. The universe
had already begun to ramify and it doubtless goes on ramifying
indefinitely, even below the tree of life.
Seen from afar, elementary life looks like a variegated multi-
tude of microscopic elements, a multitude great enough to envelop
the earth, yet at the same time sufficiently interrelated and
selected to form a structural whole of genetic solidarity.
These remarks, let it be said again, are only valid for the
general features and characters taken as a whole. That is what
should have been expected and we must be resigned to it. Follow-
ing all the dimensions of the universe one same law of perspective
inevitably blurs, in the field of our vision, the abysses of the past
and the distant backgrounds of space : what is very far and very
small loses its outline. For us to probe further into the phenomena
accompanying its origin, it would be necessary for life— some-
where or other on the earth— to be still generating today under
our eyes.
That chance— and here is my last point under this heading —
is precisely the one we are not given. 1
3. THE SEASON OF LIFE
It would be quite conceivable a priori that the mysterious trans-
formation of mega-molecules into cells, accomplished millions
of years ago, might still, unnoticed, be going on around us at the
extreme limits of the microscopic and the inhnitesimal. There are
many forces in nature that we have supposed exhausted only to
find, on closer analysis, that they are still flourishing. The earth's
1 Unless of course (ind who can tell ?) chemists succeed in reproducing
the phenomenon in the laboratory.
9<5
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet.
Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites
are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic
world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless
branches. If movement can be concealed by extreme slowness,
why should not extreme smallness have the same effect ? Indeed
there is nothing inherently impossible about the continued birth
today of living substance on an inhnitesimal scale.
In fact, however, nothing indicates this to be the case. On the
contrary, everything points the other way.
We all know of the famous controversy of nearly a hundred
years ago between the partisans and the adversaries of ' spon-
taneous generation ' . . It would appear that too much was made
at the time of the results of the battle, as though Pouchet's defeat
closed the door on any scientific hope of giving an evolutionary
explanation to the first origins of life. But today we are all agreed
on one point. From the fact diat, in the laboratory, life never
appears in a medium from which all germs have previously been
eliminated, it would be a mistake to deduce (in the face of all
manner of general evidence) that the phenomenon may not have
happened under other conditions in other ages. Pasteur's experi-
ments could not and cannot now in any way disprove the birth
of cells on our planet in the past. But their success, proved over
and over again by the universal adoption of methods of sterilisa-
tion, seems to have really established one thing: that within the
field and limits of what we can investigate, protoplasm is no
longer formed directly from the inorganic substances of the earth. 1
This obliges us at the outset to revise certain over-absolute
ideas we may have harboured concerning the use and value in
our sciences of explanations ' in terms of present causes '.
1 Against Pasteur's experiments it may be objected that sterilisation is so
brutal as to be capable of destroying not only the living germs, whose elimina-
tion is desired, but also those ' pre-living ' germs from which alone life might
emerge. However that may be, the most convincing proof to me that life was
produced once and once only on earth is furnished by the profound structural
unity of the tree of life (see below).
97
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
A moment ago I reminded the reader that many terrestrial
transformations which we could have sworn had stopped, and
stopped ages ago, are still going on in the world around us. Under
the influence of this unexpected observation which pampers our
natural preference for palpable and manageable forms of experi-
ence, our minds are inclined to slide gently into die belief that
there never was in the past or will be in the future anything new
under the sun. And it would only be one step farther to limit
full and real knowledge to the events of the present. Funda-
mentally, is not everything, apart from the present, mere ' con-
jecture ' ?
We must at all costs resist this instinctive limitation of the
rights and scope of science.
No. The world would not fully satisfy the conditions imposed
by actuality — it would not be the great world of mechanics and
biology — if we were lost in it like ephemeral insects which are
unaware of all save their brief season. So vast are the dimensions
of the universe disclosed by the present that, for this reason alone,
all sorts of things must have happened in it before man was there
to witness them. Long before the awakening of thought on earth,
manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which
have no parallel today. Thus, besides the group of pheno-
mena subject to direct observation, there is for science a particular
class of facts to be considered — specifically the most important
because the rarest and most significant — those which depend
neither on direct observation nor experiment, but can only be
brought to light by a very authentic branch of ' physics ', the
discovery of the past. And, to judge by our repeated failures to find
its equivalent around us or to reproduce it, the first apparition of
living bodies is clearly one of the most sensational of these events.
With that, let us advance a step. There are two possible ways
in which something can fail to coincide, in time, with our power
of seeing. One is for it to happen at such distant intervals that the
whole of our existence can run its course between two successive
occurrences. The other, by which we miss it still more inevitably,
is for it to have happened once and never be repeated. In other
98
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
words, either a recurrent phenomenon of very infrequent
periodicity (such as we meet so often in astronomy) or one
strictly unique (as with Socrates or Augustus in human history).
In which of these two ' inexperi mental ' or rather ' praeter-
experimental ' categories do we find it most suitable, in the light
of Pasteur's discoveries, to put the birth of life, the initial forma-
tion of cells from matter ?
There is no lack of facts to support the idea that organised
matter might germinate periodically on the earth. Later on,
when I come to outline the ' tree of life ', I shall be calling atten-
tion to the coexistence in the living world of certain large
aggregates (protozoa, plants, hydrozoa, insects, vertebrates) whose
lack of basic relationship might be fairly satisfactorily explained
in terms of heterogenous origins. Something like those succes-
sive intrusions going back to different ages originating from the
same magma, whose interlacing veins form the eruptive complex
of a single identical mountain . . . the hypodiesis of independent
vital pulsations would conveniently account for the morpho-
logical diversity of the principal sub-kingdoms recognised by
systematic biology. Moreover, there is no difficulty on the
chronological side. In any case the length of time separating the
historical origins of two successive sub-kingdoms is much greater
than the age of mankind. So it is not astonislung that we should
live in the illusion that nothing happens any more. Matter seems
dead. But could not the next pulsation be slowly preparing
around us ?
I feel bound to point out and even, to a certain extent, to
defend the conception of a spasmodic genesis of life. Yet I cannot
actually adopt it. For there is one decisive objection against the
idea of a number of different, successive, vital thrusts on the
earth's surface — namely the fundamental similarity of all organic
beings.
We have already called attention in this chapter to the curious
fact that all molecules of living substances are asymmetrical in the
same way, and contain precisely the same vitamins. Now, the
more complex organisms become, die more evident becomes
99
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
their inherent kinship. It manifests itself in the absolute and
universal uniformity of the basic cellular pattern, and it manifests
itself, particularly in animals, in the identical solutions found for
various problems of perception, nutrition and reproduction —
everywhere we find vascular and nervous systems, everywhere
some form of blood, everywhere gonads and everywhere eyes.
It continues in the similarity of the methods employed by units
for collecting together in higher organisms and becoming
' socialised ', and finally it shines clearly in the general laws of
development (' ontogenesis ' and ' phylogenesis ') which give to
the living world, considered as a whole, the coherence of a single
upthrust.
Though one or the other of these many analogies might be
explained by the adjustment of one and the same ' pre-living
magma ' under identical terrestrial conditions, it would neverthe-
less seem impossible to regard their unified complex as the result
of a simple parallelism or a simple ' convergence '. Even if there
were only one solution to the main physical and physiological
problem of life on earth, that general solution would necessarily
leave undecided a host of accidental and particular questions, and
it does not seem thinkable that they would have been decided
twice in the same way. And it is precisely in these ancillary modali-
ties that living creatures resemble each other, even those belong-
ing to very different groups. Accordingly the contrasts presented
today by zoological phyla lose much of their importance (are
they not simply effects of perspective combined with a progressive
isolation ot existing phyla ?), and naturalists are becoming more
and more convinced that the genesis of life on earth belongs to
the category of absolutely unique events that, once happened, are
never repeated. This is a much more credible hypothesis than
would appear at first sight, if we succeed in forming a tenable
idea of what is hidden in the history of our planet.
It is fashionable nowadays in geology and geophysics to
attach a preponderant importance to periodical phenomena.
Seas advance and recede ; continental platforms rise and sink ;
mountains are lifted and levelled ; glaciadons advance and retire;
ioo
THE ADVENT OF LIFE
radio-active warmth accumulates in the depths then overflows
on die surface. We hear of nothing save this majestic ' ebb and
flow ' in treatises dealing with the vicissitudes of the earth.
This predilection for what is rhythmic in events goes hand
in hand with a preference for the ' actual ' in causes, and both
alike are explained by precise rational needs. Whatever repeats
itself is, at all events potentially, observable, and can be made
subject to a law. It provides a scale on which we can measure
time. I am the first to acknowledge the scientific quality of these
advantages, yet I cannot help thinking that an exclusive analysis
of the oscillations recorded by the earth's crust or the movements
of life would omit from the inquiry what is the principal aim of
geology.
For the earth is after all something more than a sort of huge
breadiing body. Admittedly it rises and falls, but more important
is the fact that it must have begun at a certain moment ; that it
is passing through a consecutive series of moving equilibria ;
and that in all probability it is tending towards some final state.
It has a birth, a development, and presumably a death ahead.
Thus all around us, deeper than any pulsation that could be
expressed in geological eras, we must suppose there to be a total
process which is not of a periodic character defining the total
evolution of the planet; something more complicated chemicaJJy
and deeper within matter than the ' cooling ' of which we used
to hear so much ; yet something both continuous and irre-
versible. An ever-ascending curve, the points of transformation
of which are never repeated ; a constantly rising tide below the
rhythmic tides of the ages — it is on this essential curve, it is in
relation to this advancing level of the waters, that the phenomenon
of life, as I see things, must be situated.
If life, one day, was able to ' isolate ' itself in the primitive
ocean, it was no doubt because the complexity of die earth's
elements and their distribution had reached the general privileged
condition which permitted and favoured the building of proto-
plasms (which is what we mean by the earth being ' young ').
And if thereafter life has never again been formed directly
101
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
from the elements of the lithosphere or hydrosphere, this is
apparently because the very emergence of a biosphere so dis-
turbed, impoverished and relaxed the primordial chemism of
our fragment of the universe that the phenomenon can never be
repeated (unless perhaps artificially).
From this point of view — and it seems to me the right one —
the ' cellular revolution ' would now be seen as a critical singular
point, an unparalleled moment on the curve of telluric evolution,
the point o( germination. Protoplasm was formed once and once
only on earth, just as nuclei and electrons were formed once and
once only in the cosmos.
This hypothesis has the advantage of providing a reason for
the deep organic likeness which stamps all living creatures from
bacteria to mankind. At the same time it explains why we never
at any point find the formation of the least living thing wkich is
not there as the result of generation. And that was the problem.
But this hypothesis has two other notable consequences for
science.
Firstly, by separating the phenomenon of life from the
numerous other periodical and secondary events on earth, and by
making it one of the principal landmarks (or parameters) of the
sidereal evolution of the globe, it rectifies our sense of proportion
and of values and hence renews our perspective of the world.
Secondly, by the very fact of showing that the origin of
organised bodies is linked with a chemical transformation un-
precedented and unrepeated in the history of the world, the
hypothesis inclines us to think of the energy contained in the
living layer of our planet as developing from and within a sort
of closed ' quantum ', defined by the amplitude of this primordial
emission.
Life was born and propagates itself on the earth as a solitary
pulsation.
It is the propagation of that unique wave that we must now
follow, right up to man and if possible beyond him.
102
questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or via the comments below
or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers