object:3.01 - THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter
BOOK THREE - THOUGHT
CHAPTER ONE
THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
Preliminary Remark : The Human Paradox
From a purely positivist point of view man is the most mys-
terious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
In fact we may as well admit that science has not yet found a
place for him in its representations of the universe. Physics
has succeeded in provisionally circumscribing the world of the
atom. Biology has been able to impose some sort of order on
the constructions of life. Supported both by physics and biology,
anthropology in its turn docs its best to explain the structure of
the human body and some of its physiological mechanisms.
But when all these features are put together, the portrait mani-
festly falls short of the reality. Man, as science is able to recon-
struct him today, is an animal like the others — so little separable
anatomically from the anthropoids that the modern classifications
made by zoologists return to the position of Linnaeus and include
him with them in the same super-family, the hominidae. Yet,
to judge by the biological results of his advent, is he not in
reality something altogether different ?
Morphologically the leap was extremely slight, yet it was
the concomitant of an incredible commotion among the spheres
of life — there lies the whole human paradox ; and there, in the
same breath, is the evidence that science, in its present-day
reconstructions of the world, neglects an essential factor, or
rather, an entire dimension of the universe.
In conformity with the general hypothesis which throughout
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
this book has been leading us towards a coherent and expressive
interpretation of the earth as it appears today > I want to show
now, in this part devoted to thought, that, to give man his
natural position in the world of experience, it is necessary and
sufficient to consider the within as well as the without of things.
This method has already enabled us to appreciate the grandeur
and the direction of the movement of life ; and this method
will serve once again to reconcile in our eyes the insignificance
and the supreme importance of the phenomenon of man in an
order that harmoniously re-descends on life and matter.
Between the last strata of the Pliocene period, in which man is
absent, and the next, in which the geologist is dumbfounded
to find the first chipped flints, what has happened ? And what
is the true measure of this leap ?
It is our task to divine and to measure the answers to these
questions before we follow step by step the march of mankind
right down to the decisive stage in which it is involved today.
i. THE THRESHOLD OF REFLECTION
A. The Threshold of the Element : the Hominisation 1
the Individual
of
a. Nature. Biologists are not yet agreed on whether or not
there is a direction (still less a definite axis )of evolution ; nor
is there any greater agreement among psychologists, and for a
connected reason, as to whether the human psychism differs
specifically (by ' nature ') from that of man's predecessors or
not. As a matter of fact the majority of ' scientists ' would tend
to contest the validity of such a breach of continuity. So much
has been said, and is still said, about the intelligence of animals.
If wc wish to settle this question of the ' superiority ' of man
over the animals (and it is every bit as necessary to settle it for
the sake of the ethics of life as well as for pure knowledge) I can
1 [French : hominisation — a word coined by the author.]
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THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
only see one way of doing so — to brush resolutely aside all those
secondary and equivocal manifestations of inner activity in human
behaviour, making straight for the central phenomenon, reflection.
From our experimental point of view, reflection is, as the
word indicates, the power acquired by a consciousness to turn
in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed
with its own particular consistence and value : no longer merely
to know, but to know oneself ; no longer merely to know,
but to know that one knows. 1 By this individualisation of him-
self in the depths of himself, the living element, which heretofore
had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of per-
ceptions and activites, was constituted for the first time as a
centre in die form of a point at which all the impressions and
experiences knit themselves together and fuse into a unity that
is conscious of its own organisation.
Now the consequences of such a transformation are immense,
visible as clearly in nature as any of the facts recorded by physics
or astronomy. The being who is the object of his own reflection,
in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes
in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality,
another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and
inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time,
anxieties and dreams of love — all these activities of inner life
are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed
centre as it explodes onto itself.
This said, I have a question to ask. If, as follows from the
foregoing, it is the fact of being ' reflective ' which constitutes
the strictly ' intelligent ' being, can we seriously doubt that
intelligence is the evolutionary lot proper to man and to man
only ? If not, can we, under the influence of some false modesty,
hesitate to admit that man's possession of it constitutes a radical
advance on all forms of life that have gone before him ? Admit-
tedly the animal knows, but it cannot know that it knows : that
is quite certain. If it could, it would long ago have multiplied
1 [frlott plus seulement connaitre, mais se connaitre; non plus seulement savoir,
mais savoir que I'on sait.]
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
its inventions and developed a system of internal constructions
that could not have escaped our observation. In consequence
it is denied access to a whole domain of reality in which we can
move freely. We are separated by a chasm — or a threshold—
which it cannot cross. Because we are reflective we are not only
different but quite other. It is not merely a matter of change of
degree, but of a change of nature, resulting from a change of
state.
So we find ourselves confronted with exactly what we
expected at the end of the chapter we called Demeter. Life,
being an ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance
indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth.
It had, we said, like all growing realities in the world, to become
different so as to remain itself. Here, in the accession to the power
of reflection, emerges (more clearly recognisable than in the
obscure primordial psychism of the first cells) the particular and
critical form of transformation in which this surcreation or
rebirth consisted for it. And at the same moment we find the
whole curve of biogenesis reappearing summed up and clarified
in this singular point.
b. Theoretical Mechanism. All along, naturalists and philosophers
have held opinions of the utmost divergence concerning the
' psychical ' make-up of animals. For the early Schoolmen instinct
was a sort of sub-intelligence, homogeneous and fixed, marking
one of the ontological and logical stages by which being grades
downwards from pure spirit to pure materiality. For the
Cartesian only thought existed : so the animal, devoid of any
within, was a mere automaton. For most modern biologists,
as I have said already, there is no sharp line to be drawn between
instinct and thought, neither being very much more than a
sort of luminous halo enveloping the play — the only essential
thing — of the determinisms of matter.
In each of these varying opinions there is an element of
truth, but also a cause of error which becomes apparent when,
foDowing the point of view put forward in these pages, we make
up our minds to recognise (i) that instinct, far from being an
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THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
epiphenomenon, translates through its different expressions the
very phenomenon of life, and (2) that it consequently represents a
variable dimension.
What exactly happens if we look at nature from this angle ?
Firstly we realise better in our minds the fact and the reason
for the diversity of animal behaviour. From the moment we
regard evolution as primarily psychical transformation, we see
there is not one instinct in nature, but a multitude of forms of
instincts each corresponding to a particular solution of the
problem of life. The ' psychical ' make-up of an insect is not and
cannot be that of a vertebrate ; nor can the instinct of a squirrel be
that of a cat or an elephant : this in virtue of the position of each
on the tree of life.
By the fact itself, in this variety, we begin to see legitimately
a relief stand out and a gradation formed. If instinct is a variable
dimension, the instincts will not only be different ; they constitute
beneath their complexity, a growing system. They form as a
whole a kind of fan-like structure in which the higher terms
on each nervure are recognised each time by a greater range of
choice and depending on a better denned centre of co-ordination
and consciousness. And that is the very thing we see. The
mind (or psyche) of a dog, despite all that may be said to the
contrary, is positively superior to that of a mole or a fish. 1
This being said, and I am merely presenting in a different
light what has already been revealed in our study of life, the
upholders of the spiritual explanation have no need to be dis-
concerted when they see, or are obliged to see, in the higher
animals (particularly in the great apes) ways and reactions which
strangely recall those of which they make use to define the
1 From this point of view it could be said that every form of instinct tends
in its own way to become ' intelligence ' ; but it is only in the human line
that (for extrinsic or intrinsic reasons) the operation has been successful all the
■way. Having reached the stage of reflection, man would thus represent a single
one of the innumerable modalities of consciousness tried out by life in the
animal world. In all those other psychological worlds it is very difficult for
us to enter, not only because in them knowledge is more confused, but because
they work differently from ours.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
nature and prove the presence in man of ' a reasonable soul '. If
the story of life is no more than a movement of consciousness
veiled by morphology, it is inevitable that, towards the summit of
the series, in the proximity of man, the ' psychical ' make-ups seem
to reach the borders of intelligence. And that is exactly what happens.
Hence light is thrown on the ' human paradox ' itself. We
are disturbed to notice how little ' anthropos ' differs anatomi-
cally from the other anthropoids, despite his incontestable mental
pre-eminence in certain respects — so disturbed that we feel almost
ready to abandon the attempt to distinguish them, at least
towards their point of origin. But is not this extraordinary
resemblance precisely what had to be ?
When water is heated to boiling point under normal pressure,
and one goes on heating it, the first thing that follows — without
change of temperature — is a tumultuous expansion of freed and
vaporised molecules. Or, taking a series of sections trom the
base towards the summit of a cone, their area decreases con-
stantly ; then suddenly, with another infinitesimal displacement,
the surface vanishes leaving us with a point. Thus by these remote
comparisons we are able to imagine the mechanism involved in
the critical threshold of reflection.
By the end of the Tertiary era, the psychical temperature in
the cellular world had been rising for more than 500 million
years. From branch to branch, from layer to layer, we have seen
how nervous systems followed pari passu the process of increased
complication and concentration. Finally, with the primates, an
instrument was fashioned so remarkably supple and rich that the
step immediately following could not take place without the
whole animal psychism being as it were recast and consolidated
on itself. Now this movement did not stop, for there was
nothing in the structure of the organism to prevent it advancing.
When the anthropoid, so to speak, had been brought ' mentally '
to boiling point some further calories were added. Or, when the
anthropoid had almost reached the summit of the cone, a final
effort took place along the axis. No more was needed for the
whole inner equilibrium to be upset. What was previously only
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THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
a centred surface became a centre. By a tiny ' tangential ' in-
crease, the ' radial ' was turned back on itself and so to speak
took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the
organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken
place : consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of
super-sensory relationships and representations ; and simultane-
ously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the con-
centrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for
the first time. 1
Those who adopt the spiritual explanation are right when
they defend so vehemently a certain transcendence of man over
the rest of nature. But neither are the materialists wrong when
they maintain that man is just one further term in a series of
animal forms. Here, as in so many cases, the two antithetical
kinds of evidences are resolved in a movement — provided that
in this movement we emphasise the highly natural phenomenon
of the ' change of state '. From the cell to the thinking animal,
as from the atom to the cell, a single process (a psychical kindling
or concentration) goes on without interruption and always in the
same direction. But by virtue of this permanence in the opera-
tion, it is inevitable from the point of view of physics that certain
leaps suddenly transform the subject of the operation.
c. Realisation. Discontinuity in continuity : that is how, in the
theory of its mechanism, the birth of thought, like that of life,
presents itself and defines itself.
1 Need I repeat that 1 confine myself here to the phenomena, i.e. to the
experimental relations between consciousness and complexity, without pre-
judging the deeper causes which govern the whole issue ? In virtue of the limi-
tations imposed on our sensory knowledge by the play of the temporo-spatial
series, it is only, it seems, under the appearances of a critical point that we can
grasp experimentally the ' hominising ' (spiritualising) step to reflection. But,
with that said, there is nothing to prevent the thinker who adopts a spiritual
explanation from positing (for reasons of a higher order and at a later stage of
his dialectic), under the phenomenal veil of a revolutionary transformation,
whatever ' creative ' operation or ' special intervention ' he likes (see Prefatory
Note). Is it not a principle universally accepted by Christian thought in its
theological interpretation of reality that for our minds there arc different and
successive planes of knowledge?
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
But how has the mechanism worked in its concrete reality ?
Had there been a witness to the crisis, what would have been
externally visible to him of the metamorphosis ?
As I shall be saying later on, when I come to deal with the
' primaeval forms of man ', this picture we are so eager to paint
will probably, like the origin of life, remain for ever beyond
our grasp — and for the same reasons. The most we have to
guide us here is the resource of thinking of the awakening of
intelligence in the child in the course of ontogeny. Two remarks
deserve, however, to be made, the one circumscribing, the other
still further deepening, the mystery which veils this singular
point from our imagination.
The first is that to culminate in man at the stage of reflection,
life must have been preparing a whole group of factors for a long
time and simultaneously — though nothing at first sight could
have given grounds for supposing that they would be linked
together ' providentially '.
It is true that in the end, from the organic point of view, the
whole metamorphosis leading to man depends on die question
of a better brain. But how was this cerebral perfectioning to be
carried out — how could it have worked — if there had not been a
whole series of other conditions realised at just the same time ?
If the creature from which man issued had not been a biped,
his hands would not have been free in time to release the jaws
from their prehensile function, and the thick band of maxillary
muscles which had imprisoned the cranium could not have been
relaxed. It is thanks to two-footedness freeing the hands that the
brain was able to grow ; and thanks to this, too, that the eyes,
brought closer together on the diminished face, were able to
converge and fix on what the hands held and brought before
them — the very gesture which formed the external counterpart
of reflection. In itself this marvellous conjunction should not
surprise us. Surely the smallest thing formed in the world is
always the result of the most formidable coincidence — a knot
whose strands have been for all time converging from the four
corners of space. Life docs not work by following a single thread,
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THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
nor yet by fits and starts. It pushes forward its whole network at
one and the same time. So is the embryo fashioned in the womb
that bears it. This we have reason to know, but it is satisfying to
us precisely to recognise that man was born under the same
maternal law. And we are happy to admit that the birth of
intelligence corresponds to a turning in upon itself, not only of
the nervous system, but of the whole being. What at first sight
disconcerts us, on the other hand, is the need to accept that this
step could only be achieved at one single stroke.
For that is to be my second remark, a remark I cannot avoid.
In the case of human ontogeny we can slur over the question
at what moment the new-born child may be said to achieve
intelligence and become a thinking being, for we find a con-
tinuous series of states happening in the same individual from
the fertilised ovum to the adult. What does it matter whether
there is a hiatus or where it might be ? It is quite different in the
case of a phyletic embryogenesis in which each stage or each
state is represented by a different being, and it is impossible (at any
rate within the scope of modern methods of thought) to evade
the problem of discontinuity. If the threshold of reflection is
really (as its physical nature seems to require, and as we have
ourselves admitted) a critical transformation, a mutation from
zero to everything, it is impossible for us to imagine an inter-
mediary individual at this precise level. Either this being has not
yet reached, or it has already got beyond, this change of state.
Look at it as we will, we cannot avoid the alternative — either
thought is made unthinkable by a denial of its psychical trans-
cendence over instinct, or we are forced to admit that it appeared
between two individuals.
The terms of this proposition are disconcerting, but they
become less bizarre, and even inoffensive, if we observe that,
speaking strictly as scientists, we may suppose that intelligence
might (or even must) have been as little visible externally at its
phyletic origin as it is today to our eyes in every new-born
child at the ontogenetical stage: in which case every tangible
subject of debate between the observer and the theorist disappears.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
To say nothing of the fact (see the second form of the ' un-
graspable' in the footnote on p. 186) that any sort of scientific
discussion today on the outward and visible signs of the first
emergence of reflection on the earth (even supposing there had
been a spectator there to see them) is quite impossible ; because,
here if anywhere, we find ourselves in the presence of one of those
beginnings (' infinitely small quantities in evolution ') automati-
cally and irremediably removed from our range of vision by a
thick layer of the past (see Note, p. 122).
Without trying to picture the unimaginable, let us therefore
keep hold of one idea— that the access to thought represents a
threshold which had to be crossed at a single stride ; a ' trans-
experimental ' interval about which scientifically we can say
nothing, but beyond which we find ourselves transported onto
an entirely new biological plane.
d. Prolongation. It is only at this point that we can fully see the
nature of the transit to reflection. In the first place it involved
a change of state ; then, by this very fact, the beginning of
another kind of life — precisely that interior life of which I have
spoken above. A moment ago we compared the simplicity of
the thinking mind with that of a geometrical point. It would
have been better to speak of a line or an axis. Where intelligence
is concerned, ' to be posited ' does not mean ' to be achieved '.
As soon as a child is born, it must breathe or it will die. Similarly
the reflective psychic centre, once turned in upon itself, can
only subsist by means of a double movement which is in reality
one and the same. It centres itself further on itself by pene-
tration into a new space, and at the same time it centres the rest
of the world around itself by the establishment of an ever more
coherent and better organised perspective in the realities which
surround it. We are not dealing with an immutably fixed focus
but with a vortex which grows deeper as it sucks up the fluid
at the heart of which it was born. The ego only persists by becom-
ing ever more itself, in the measure in which it makes everything
else itself. So man becomes a person in and through personalisation.
Obviously by the effect of such a transformation the entire
172
THE BIRTH OP THOUGHT
structure of life is modified. Up to this point the animated
element was so narrowly subject to the phylum that its own
individuality could be regarded as accessory and sacrificed. It
received, maintained, acquired if possible, reproduced and trans-
mitted. And so on ceaselessly and indefinitely. Caught up
in the chain of succeeding generations, the animal seemed to
lack the right to live ; it appeared to have no value for itself. It
was a fugitive foothold for a process which passed over it and
ignored it. Life, once again, was more real than living things.
With the advent of the power of reflection (an essentially
elemental property, at any rate to begin with) everything is
changed, and we now perceive that under the more striking
reality of the collective transformations a secret progress has
been going on parallel to individualisation. The more highly
each phylum became charged with psychism, the more it tended
to ' granulate '. The animal grew in value in relation to the
speci2S. Finally at the level of man the phenomenon gathers new
power and takes definitive shape. With the ' person ', endowed
by ' personalisation ' with an indefinite power of elemental
evolution, the branch ceases to bear, as an anonymous whole,
the exclusive promises for the future. The cell has become
' someone '. After the grain of matter, the grain of life ; and
now at last we see constituted the^rai'n oj thought.
Does that mean that the phylum loses its function from this
moment and vanishes in thin air, like those animals who lose
their identity in a veritable dust of spores which they give birth
to in dying ? Above the point of reflection, does the whole
interest of evolution shift, passing from life into a plurality of
isolated living beings ?
Nothing of the sort. Only, from this crucial date the global
spurt, without slackening in the slightest, has acquired another
degree, another order of complexity. The phylum does not
break like a fragile jet just because henceforward it is fraught
with thinking centres ; it does not crumble into its elementary
psychisms. On the contrary it is reinforced by an inner lining,
an additional framework. Until now it was enough to consider
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
in nature a simple vibration on a wide front, the ascent of
individual centres of consciousness. What we now have to do is to
define and regulate harmoniously an ascent of consciousnesses (a
much more delicate phenomenon). We are dealing with a pro-
gress made up of other progresses as lasting as itself ; a movement
of movements.
Let us try to lift our minds high enough to dominate the
problem. For that, let us forget for a moment die particular
destiny of the spiritual elements engaged in the general trans-
formation. It is, in point of fact, only by following the ascension
and spread of the whole in its main lines that we are able, after
a long detour, to determine the part reserved for individual hopes
in the total success.
We thus reach the personalisation of the individual by the
' hominisation ' of the whole group.
b. The Threshold of the Phylum : the Hominisation of the Species
Thus, through this leap of intelligence, whose nature and
mechanism we have been analysing in the thinking particle,
life continues in some way to spread as though nothing had
happened. According to all appearances, propagation, multi-
plication and ramification went on in man, as in other animals,
after the threshold of thought, as busily as before. Nothing, one
might think, had altered in the current. But the water in it was
no longer the same. Like a river enriched by contact with an
alluvial plain, the vital flux, as it crossed the stages of reflection,
was charged with new principles, and as a result manifested new
activities. From now onwards it was not merely animated
grains which the pressure of evolution pumped up the living
stem, but grains of thought. What was to happen under this
influence to the colour or the shape of the leaves, the flowers,
the fruit ?
I would be anticipating later developments of our argument
if I gave a detailed and considered answer to this question now.
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THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
But it would be as well to indicate at once three particularities
which manifest themselves in any and every operation or pro-
duction of the species from the moment the threshold of thought
is crossed. One concerns the composition of new branches,
another the general direction of their growth, the third their
relations to and differences from — taken as a whole — what had
flourished earlier on the tree of life.
a. The composition of the human branches. Whatever idea we have
about the inner mechanism of evolution, there is no denying
that each zoological group is enclosed in a certain psychological
envelope. We have already said that each type of insect, bird or
mammal has its own instincts. So far no attempt has been made
to link together systematically the two elements, namely the
somatic and psychic, of the species. There are naturalists who
describe and classify shapes, and others who specialise in the study
of behaviour. In fact, below man, purely morphological criteria
provide a perfectly adequate framework for studying the dis-
tribution of species. But from the advent of man difficulties
appear. We cannot fail to be aware of the extreme confusion
which prevails concerning the significance and the distribution
of the extremely varied groups into which mankind divides up
under our very eyes — races, nations, states, countries, cultures,
etc. In these diverse and constantly shifting categories, people as
a rule only care to see heterogeneous units — some natural (race),
others artificial (nations) — overlapping irregularly on different
planes.
It is an unpleasing and unnecessary irregularity, and one
which vanishes as soon as we give its proper place to the within
as well as to the without of things.
Indeed, from this more comprehensive point of view, the
composition of the human group with its branches, however
confused it may appear, can be reduced nevertheless to the
general rules of biology. But, by the exaggeration of a variable
that had remained negligible in the animals, it simply brings
out the dual nature of those rules or even, on the contrary — if
what is somatic is woven by the psyche — their fundamental
I7S
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
unity. This is not an exception but a generalisation. It is impos-
sible to remain long in doubt : in the world become human
it is always the zoological ramification which, in spite of all
appearances and all complexities, pushes onwards and operates
according to the same mechanism as before. Only, as a result
of the quantity of inner energy liberated by reflection, the
operation then tends to emerge from the material organs so as
to formulate itself also or even above all in the mind. What is
spontaneously psychical is no longer merely an aura round the
' soma '. It becomes an appreciable part, or even a principal
part, of the phenomenon. And because variations of soul are
much richer and more subtle than the often imperceptible organic
changes which accompany them, it is obvious that the mere
inspection of bones or integuments will not suffice to explain
or to catalogue the progresses of the total zoological differentia-
tion. That is how things stand. And the remedy faces us no less
clearly. To unravel the structure of a thinking phylum, anatomy
by itself is not enough : it must be backed up by psychology.
This is a laborious complication of course, since it becomes
clear that no satisfactory classification of the human ' genus '
will be forthcoming, save through the combined play of two
partially independent variable. But it is a fruitful complication,
for two reasons.
On the one hand, at the price of this difficulty, order and
homogeneity — that is to say, truth — come back into our per-
spectives of life extended to include man ; and, because we
realise correlatively the organic value of every social construction,
we feel already more inclined to treat it as a subject of science,
hence to respect it.
On the other hand, from the very fact that the fibres of the
human phylum appear surrounded by their psychic sheath,
we can begin to understand the extraordinary power of aggluti-
nation and coalescence that they show. Which brings us at the
same time on the track of the fundamental discovery with which
our study of the phenomenon of man is to culminate — the con-
vergence of the spirit.
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THE BIRTH OP THOUGHT
b. The General Direction of Growth. So long as our perspectives
of the psychic nature of zoological evolution were based only
on the examination of animal lines and their nervous systems,
the direction of that evolution remained perforce as vague for
our knowledge as the soul itself of those distant relations of ours.
Consciousness rises through living beings : that was about all
we were able to say. But from the moment the threshold of
thought is crossed its progress becomes easier to unravel ; for
life has not only reached the rung on which we ourselves stand,
but begins to overflow freely by its free activity beyond the
boundary within which it had been confined by the exigences
of physiology. The message is more clearly written, and we
are better able to follow it, because we recognise ourselves in it.
Earlier, when we were discussing the tree of life, we noticed as
a fundamental character that brains grew bigger and became
more differentiated along each zoological stem. To define the ex-
tension and the counterpart of this law (after the transit to reflec-
tion) it will henceforth be sufficient to say : ' Following each
anthropological line, it is the human element that seeks itself and
grows.'
A moment ago I referred to the unparalleled complexity of
the human group — all those races, those nations, those states
whose entanglements defy the resourcefulness of anatomists and
ethnologists alike. There are so many rays in that spectrum that
we despair of analysing them. Let us try instead to perceive
what this multiplicity represents when viewed as a whole. If
we do this we will see that its disturbing aggregation is nothing
but a multitude of sequins all sending back to each other by
reflection the same light. We find hundreds or thousands of
facets, each expressing at a different angle a reality which seeks
itself among a world of groping forms. We are not astonished
(because it happens to us) to see in each person around us the
spark of reflection developing year by year. We are all conscious,
too, at all events vaguely, that something in our atmosphere is
changing with the course of history. If we add these two pieces
of evidence together (and rectify certain exaggerated views on
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
the purely ' germinal ' and passive nature of heredity), how is
it that we are not more sensitive to the presence of something
greater than ourselves moving forward within us and in our
midst ?
Up to the level of thought a question could still be asked of
the science of nature — the question about the evolutionary value
and transmission of acquired characters. As we know, the
biologist tended, and still tends, to be sceptical and evasive ; and
perhaps he is right, as regards the fixed zones of the body he likes
to confine himself to. But what happens if we give the psyche
its legitimate place in the integrity of living organisms ? Im-
mec'iitely, over the alleged independence of the phyletic ' germ-
plasm ', the individual activity of the ' soma ' reclaims its rights.
In the insects, for example, or the beaver, we see in the most
blatant way the existence of hereditarily-formed or even fixed
instincts underlying the play of animal spontaneities. From
reflection onwards, the reality of this mechanism becomes not
only manifest but preponderant. Under the free and ingenious
effort of successive intelligences, something (even in the absence of
any measurable variation of brain or cranium) irreversibly
accumulates, according to all the evidence, and is transmitted, at
least collectively by means of education, down the course of
ages. The point here is that this ' something ' — construction of
matter or construction of beauty, systems of thought or systems
of action— ends up always by translating itself into an augmenta-
tion of consciousness, and consciousness in its turn, as we now
know, is nothing less than the substance and heart of life in process
of evolution.
What can this mean except that, over and above this particular
phenomenon — the individual accession to reflection — science
has grounds for recognising another phenomenon of a reflective
nature co-extensive with the whole of mankind. Here as else-
where in the universe, the whole shows itself to be greater than the
simple sum of the elements of which it is formed. The human
individual does not exhaust in himself the vital potentialities of
his race. But following each strand known to anthropology
178
THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
and sociology, we meet with a stream whereby a continuing
and transmissible tradition of reflection is established and allowed
to increase. So from individual men there springs the human
reality ; from human phylogenesis, the human stem. 1
c. Connections and Differences. That seen and accepted, under
what form should we expect the human stem to rise up ? Will
it, because it is a thinking stem, sever the fibres which attach it
to the past — and, at the summit of the vertebrate branch, will
it develop from new elements and according to a new plan, like
some neoplasm ? To imagine such a rupture would be, once
again, to misjudge and underestimate our own ' dimension '
as well as the organic unity of the world and the methods of
evolution. In a flower the sepals, petals, stamens and pistil arc
not leaves and they have probably never been leaves. Yet they
possess unmistakably in their attachments and their texture
everything that would have resulted in a leaf had they not been
formed under a new influence and a new destiny. Similarly,
with the human inflorescence, we can see transformed or under-
going transformation the vessels, the disposition, and even the
sap of the stalk upon which the inflorescence was born : not
only the individual structure of the organs and the interior
ramifications of the species, but even the tendencies and behaviour
of the * soul '.
In man, considered as a zoological group, everything is
extended simultaneously — sexual attraction, with the laws of
reproduction ; the inclination to struggle for survival, with the
competitions it involves; the need for nourishment, with the
accompanying taste for seizing and devouring ; curiosity, to
see, with its delight in investigation ; the attraction of joining
others to live in society. Each of these fibres traverses each
one of us, coming up from far below and stretching beyond
and above us. And each one of them has its story (no less true
1 [Even if the Lamarckian view of the heritability of acquired charac-
teristics is biologically vieux jeu, and decisively refuted, when we reach the
human level and have to reckon with history, culture etc., * transmission '
becomes ' tradition '. Sec M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Kegan Paul, 1958)].
179
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
than any other) to tell of the whole course of evolution —
evolution of love, evolution of war, evolution of research,
evolution of the social sense. But each one, just because it is
evolutionary, undergoes a metamorphosis as it crosses the
threshold of reflection. Beyond this point it is enriched by new
possibilities, new colours, new fertility. It is the same thing,
if you tike, but it is something quite different also — a figure that
has become transformed by a change of space and dimension, dis-
continuity superimposed upon continuity, mutation upon evolu-
tion.
In this supple inflection, in this harmonious recasting which
transfigures the whole grouping of vital antecedences, both
external and internal, we cannot fail to find precious confirma-
tion of what we had already guessed. When an object begins
to grow in one of its accessory parts, it is thrown out of equili-
brium and becomes deformed. To remain symmetrical and
beautiful a body must be modified simultaneously throughout,
in the direction of one of its principal axes. Reflection conserves
even while re-shaping all the lines of the phylum on which it
settles. There is no fortuitous excrescence of a parasitic energy.
Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the
essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.
To this grand process of sublimation it is fitting to apply
with all its force the word hominisation. Horninisation can be
accepted in the first place as the individual and instantaneous
leap from instinct to thought, but it is also, in a wider sense,
the progressive phyletic spiritualisation in human civilisation of
all the forces contained in the animal world.
Thus we are led — after having considered the element and
pictured the species — to contemplate the earth in its totality.
c. The Threshold of the Terrestrial Planet : the Noosphere
When compared to all the living verticils, die human phylum
is not like any other. But because the specific orthogenesis of
1 80
THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
the primates (urging them towards increasing cerebralisation)
coincides with the axial orthogenesis of organised matter (urging
all living things towards a higher consciousness) man, appearing
at the heart of the primates, flourishes on the leading shoot of
zoological evolution. It was with this observation that we
rounded off our remarks on the state of the Pliocene world.
It is easy to see what privileged value that unique situation
will confer upon the transit to reflection.
' The biological change of state terminating in the awakening
of thought does not represent merely a critical point that the
individual or even the species must pass through. Vaster than
that, it affects life itself in its organic totality, and consequendy
it marks a transformation affecting the state of the entire planet.'
Such is the evidence — born of all the other testimony we have
gradually assembled and added together in the course of our
nquiry — which imposes itself irresistibly on both our logic and
observation.
We have been following the successive stages of the same
grand progression from the fluid contours of the early earth.
Beneath the pulsations of geo-chemistry, of geo-tectonics and
of geo-biology, we have detected one and the same fundamental
process, always recognisable — the one which was given material
form in the first cells and was continued in the construction of
nervous systems. We saw geogenesis promoted to biogenesis,
which turned out in the end to be nothing else than psycho-
genesis.
With and within the crisis of reflection, the next term in the
series manifests itself. Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it
effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher
function — the engendering and subsequent development of the
mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living
creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole
world took a pace forward.
As regards the choices and rep onsibili ties of our activity,
the consequences of this discovery are enormous. As regards
our understanding of the earth they are decisive.
181
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
Geologists have for long agreed in admitting the zonal
composition of our planet. We have already spoken of the
barysphere, central and metallic, surrounded by the rocky
lithosphere that in turn is surrounded by the fluid layers of the
hydrosphere and the atmosphere. Since Suess, science has rightly
become accustomed to add another to these four concentric
layers, the living membrane composed of the fauna and flora of
the globe, the biosphere, so often mentioned in these pages, an
envelope as definitely universal as the other ' spheres ' and even
more definitely individualised than them. For, instead of repre-
senting a more or less vague grouping, it forms a single piece,
of the very tissue of the genetic relations which delineate the tree
of life.
The recognition and isolation of a new era in evolution, the
ear of noogenesis, obliges us to distinguish correlatively a support
proportionate to the operation — that is to say, yet another mem-
brane in the majestic assembly of telluric layers. A glow ripples
outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point
of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening
circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.
Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy
of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as
extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the
' thinking layer \ which, since its germination at the end of the
Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants
and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere
there is the noospherc.
With that it bursts upon us how utterly warped is every
classification of the living world (or, indirectly, every construc-
tion of the physical one) in which man only figures logically
as a genus or a new family. This is an error of perspective which
deforms and uncrowns the whole phenomenon of the universe.
To give man his true place in nature it is not enough to find
one more pigeon-hole in the edifice of our systematisation or
even an additional order or branch. With hominisation, in spite
of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the begin-
182
THE BIRTH OP THOUGHT
ning of a new age. The earth ' gets a new skin '. Better still, it
finds its soul.
Therefore, given its place in reality in proper dimensions,
the historic threshold of reflection is much more important than
any zoological gap, whether it be the one marking the origin of
the tetrapods or even that of the metazoa. Among all the stages
successively crossed by evolution, the birth of thought comes
directly after, and is the only thing comparable in order of
importance to, the condensation of the terrestrial chemism or the
advent of life itself.
The paradox of man resolves itself by passing beyond measure.
Despite the relief and harmony it brings to things, this perspective
is at first sight disconcerting, running counter as it does to the
illusion and habits which incline us to measure events by their
material face. It also seems to us extravagant because, steeped
as wc are in what is human like a fish in the sea, we have diffi-
culty in emerging from it in our minds so as to appreciate its
specificness and breadth. But let us look round us a little more
carefully. This sudden deluge of cerebralisation, this biological
invasion of a new animal type which gradually eliminates or
subjects all forms of life that are not human, this irresistible tide
of fields and factories, this immense and growing edifice of
matter and ideas — all these signs that we look at, for days on end
— to proclaim that there has been a change on the earth and a
change of planetary magnitude.
There can indeed be no doubt that, to an imaginary geologist
coming one day far in the future to inspect our fossilised globe,
the most astounding of the revolutions undergone by the earth
would be that which took place at the beginning of what has
so rightly been called the psychozoic era. And even today, to a
Martian capable of analysing sidereal radiations psychically no
less than physically, the first characteristic of our planet would be,
not the blue of the seas or the green of the forests, but the phos-
phorescence of thought.
The greatest revelation open to science today is to perceive
that everything precious, active and progressive originally con-
183
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
tained in that cosmic fragment from which our world emerged,
is now concentrated in a ' crowning ' noospherc.
And what is so supremely instructive about the origins of
this noosphere (if we know how to look) is to see how gradually,
by dint of being universally and lengthily prepared, the enormous
event of its birth took place.
2. THE ORIGINAL FORMS
Man came silently into the world.
For a century or so, the scientific problem of the origin of
man has been under discussion, and a swelling team of research
workers has been digging feverishly into die past to discover
the initial point of hominisation, and yet I cannot find a more
expressive formula than this to sum up all our prehistoric know-
ledge. The more we find of fossil human remains and the better
we understand their anatomic features and their succession in
geological time, the more evident it becomes, by an unceasing
convergence of all signs and proofs, that the human ' species ',
however unique the ontological position that reflection gave
it, did not, at the moment of its advent, make any sweeping
change in nature. Whether we consider the species in its environ-
ment, in the morphology of its stem, or in the global structure of
its group, we see it emerge phyletically exactly like any other
species.
Firstly, in its environment. As we know from palaeontology,
an animal form never comes singly. It is sketched out in the
heart of a verticil of neighbouring forms among which it takes
shape, so to speak, gropingly. So it is with man. Regarded
zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature.
In his cradle he was less isolated. Nowadays there is no more
room for doubt. Over a well-defined but immense area, extend-
ing from South Africa to Southern China and Malaya, amongst
the rocks and the forest, at the end of the Tertiary period, the
anthropoids were far more numerous than they are today.
184
THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
Besides the gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-outang, now thrown
back into their last strongholds like the Australian bushmen and
the negrillos of our day, there was a whole population of other big
primates, some of whom (the African Australopithecus, for
instance) seem to have been far more hominoid than any alive
today.
Secondly, in the morphology of its stem. With the multiplica-
tion of sister-forms ', what indicates to the naturalist the origin
of a living stem is a certain convergence of the axis of that stem
with that of its neighbours. In the proximity of a knot, the leaves
grow closer together. Not only is a species at its birth found
bunched with others, but, like them it betrays much more
clearly than in adult life its zoological parentage. The farther we
follow an animal line back into the past, the more numerous
and the more palpable arc its ' primitive ' features. Here too,
man, on the whole, keeps strictly to the habitual phyletic mechan-
ism. All we need is to try to arrange in a descending series
Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus after the Neanderthaloids
below present-day man. Palaeontology does not often succeed
in tracing so satisfying an alignment.
Thirdly, in the structure oj its group. However well-defined
the characters of a phylum may be, it is never found to be alto-
gether simple, like a pure radiation. On the contrary, as far
as we can follow it into the depths of its past, it manifests an
internal tendency to cleavage and dispersion. Newly born, or
even while being born, the species breaks up into varieties or
sub-species. This is known to all naturalists. Keeping it in mind,
let us take another look at man, man whose pre-history (even
the most ancient) proves his congenital aptitude for ramification.
Is it possible to deny that in the fan of the anthropoids he isolated
himself — in this subject to the laws of all animate matter — as a
fan of his own ?
I was not exaggerating in the least. The more deeply science
plumbs the past of our humanity, the more clearly does it see
that humanity, as a species, conforms to the rhythm and the rules
that marked each new offshoot on the tree of life before the
185
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
advent of mankind. Thus we are logically obliged to pursue
the subject to its conclusion. Since man as a species is at birth so
similar to the other phyla, let us stop being surprised if, as with
all living groups, the fragile secrets of his earliest origins give
our science the slip; and let us henceforward forbear to force
and falsify this natural condition with clumsy questionings.
Man came silently into the world. As a matter of fact he
trod so softly that, when we first catch sight of him as revealed
by those indestructible stone instruments, we find him sprawling
all over the old world from the Cape of Good Hope to Peking.
Without doubt he already speaks and lives in groups ; he already
makes fire. After all, this is surely what we ought to expect.
As we know, each time a new living form rises up before us out
of the depths of history, it is always complete and already legion.
Thus in the eyes of science, which at long range can only see
things in bulk, the ' first man ' is, and can only be, a crowd, and
his infancy is made up of thousands and thousands of years. 1
It is inevitable that this situation should be disappointing,
leaving our curiosity unsatisfied. For what most interests us is
precisely what happened during those first thousands of years.
And still more, what marked the first critical moment. Dearly
would we love to know what those first parents o( ours looked
like, the ones that stood just this side of the threshold of reflection.
As I have already said, that threshold had to be crossed in a single
stride. Imagine the past to have been photographed section by
section : at that critical moment of initial hominisation, what
should we sec when we developed our fdm ?
If we have understood the limits of enlargement imposed by
nature on the instrument which helps us to study the landscape
1 That is why the problem of monogenism in the stria sense of the word
(I do not say monophyletism— see below) seems to elude science as such by its
very nature. At those depths of time when hominisation took place, the
presence and the movements of a unique couple are positively ungraspable,
unrcvealable to our eyes at no matter what magnification. Accordingly one
can say that there is room m this interval for anything that a trans-experimental
source of knowledge might demand.
1 86
THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
of the past, we shall be prepared to forgo the satisfaction of
this futile curiosity. No photograph could record upon the
human phylum diis passage to reflection which so naturally
intrigues us, for the simple reason that the phenomenon took
place inside that which is always lacking in a reconstructed
phylum — the peduncle of its original forms.
But if die tangible forms of this peduncle escape us, can we
not at any rate guess indirectly at its complexity and initial
structure ? On these points palaeanthropology has not yet made
up its mind. We could, however, try to form an opinion. 1
A number of anthropologists, and those not the least eminent,
think the peduncle of our race must have been composed of
several distinct but related ' bundles '. Just as, on the plane of
human intellect, once a certain degree of preparation and tension
has been reached, the same idea may come to birth at several
points simultaneously, so in the same way, man, according to
these authorities, must have started simultaneously in several
regions on the ' anthropoid layer ' of the Pliocene era, thereby
following the general mechanism of all life. This is not properly
speaking ' polyphyletism ', because the different points of
germination are located on the same zoological stem, but it is an
extensive mutation of the whole stein itself. The idea involves
' hologenesis ' and therefore polycentricity. What we get is a
whole series of points of hominisation scattered along a sub-
tropical zone of the earth, and hence several human stems be-
coming genetically merged somewhere beneath the threshold of
reflection ; not a ' focus ' but a ' front ' of evolution.
Though not disputing the value and the scientific probabilities
of this perspective, I feel myself personally attracted to a slightly
1 Some idea of how the transit to man was effected zoologically is perhaps
suggested by the case of Australopithecus mentioned above. In this South
African family of Pliocene anthropomorphs (evidently a group in a state of
active mutation) in which a whole scries of hominoid characters overlay a
basis still clearly simian, we can see an image perhaps, or call it a faint echo,
of what was taking place at about the same period even not far from there, in
another anthropoid group, in this case culminating in genuine hominisa-
tion.
I8 7
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
different hypothesis. I have already stressed several times that
curious peculiarity shown by zoological branches of bearing
fixed on them, like essential characters, certain traits whose origin
is plainly peculiar and accidental— such as the tritubercular teeth
and seven cervical vertebrae of the higher mammals, the four-
footedness of the walking vertebrates, the rotatory power in one
particular direction of organic substances. Precisely because these
traits are secondary and accidental, their universal occurrence
in groups, sometimes vast, can only be properly explained by
assuming these groups to derive from a highly particularised
and therefore extremely localised verticil. We would thus
perhaps find no more than a single radiation in a verticil to support
originally a layer or even a branch or even the whole of life. Or,
if some convergence has played a part, it can only have been
amongst closely-related fibres.
In the light of these considerations, and particularly when
dealing with a group as homogeneous and specialised as the one
under discussion, I feel inclined to minimise die effects of paral-
lelism in the initial formation of the human branch. On the
verticil of the higher primates, this branch did not, in my opinion,
glean its fibres here and there, one by one, from the whole
range offered : but, even more closely than any other species,
this branch, I am convinced, represents the thickening and suc-
cessful development of one solitary stem among all— this stem
being, moreover, the most central of the collection because the
most vital and, except for the brain, the least specialised. If
that is right, all human lines join up genetically, but at the
bottom, at the very point of reflection. 1
And now, if we do assume the strictly unique existence of
such a peduncle at the origin of man, what more (still keeping
to the plane of pure phenomena) can we say about its length
and probable thickness ? Should we, like Osborn, locate its
1 Which amounts to saying that if the science of man can say nothing directly
for or against monogenism (a single initial couple— sec note p. 186) it can on
the other hand come out decisively, it seems, in favour of monophyletism (a
single phylum).
188
THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT
separation very low down, in the Eocene or Oligocene period
in a ramification of pre-anthropoid forms ? Or should we, like
W. K. Gregory, regard it as a branching off from the anthropoid
verticil as late as the Pliocene age ?
Another question, always on the same subject and still
maintaining a strictly ' phenomenal ' attitude : what minimum
diameter should we ascribe as biologically possible to this stem
(whether it is deep or not) if we consider it at its initial point
of hominisation ? For it to be able to ' mutate ', resist and live,
what is the minimum number of individuals (in order of size)
that must have undergone simultaneously the metamorphosis of
reflec:ion ? However monophyletic one supposes it to be, surely
a species is always sketched out like a diffuse current in a river — by
mass effects ? Or, on the contrary, should wc rather view it as
propagating itself like crystallisation beginning with a few parts
— by effect of unities ? In our minds the two symbols (each pardy
uue perhaps) still conflict and have their respective advantages
and attractions. We must have the patience to wait until their
synthesis is established.
Let us wait. And to encourage our patience let us recall
the two following points.
The first is that on every hypothesis, however solitary his
advent, man emerged from a general groping of the world. He
was born a direct lineal descendant from a total effort of life,
so that the species has an axial value and a pre-eminent dignity.
At bottom, to satisfy our intelligence and the requirements of
our conduct, we have no need to know more than this.
The second point is that, fascinating as the problem of our
origin is, its solution even in detail would not solve the problem
of man. Wc have every reason to regard the discovery of fossil
men as one of the most illuminating and critical lines of modern
research. We must not, however, on that account, entertain
any illusions concerning the limits in all its domains of that form
of analysis that we call embryogenesis. If in its structure the
embryo of each thing is fragile, fleeting and hence, in the past,
practically ungraspablc, how much more is it ambiguous and
189
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
undecipherable in its lineaments ? It is not in their germinal
state that beings manifest themselves but in their florescence.
Taken at the source, the greatest rivers are no more than narrow
streams.
To grasp the truly cosmic scale of the phenomenon of man,
we had to follow its roots through life, back to when the earth
first folded in on itself. But if we want to understand the specific
nature of man and divine his secret, we have no other method
than to observe what reflection has already provided and what
it announces ahead.
TOO
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