object:3.03 - THE MODERN EARTH
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter
CHAPTER THREE
THE MODERN EARTH
A Change of Age
In every epoch man has thought himself at a ' turning-point
of history '. And to a certain extent, as he is advancing on a
rising spiral, he has not been wrong. But there are moments
when this impression of transformation becomes accentuated
and is thus particularly justified. And we are certainly not
exaggerating the importance of our contemporary existences in
estimating that, upon them, a turn of profound importance is
taking place in the world which may even crush them.
When did this turn begin ? It is naturally impossible to say
exactly. Like a great ship, the human mass only changes its
course gradually, so much so that we can put far back — at least
as far as the Renaissance — the first vibrations which indicate the
change of route. It is clear, at any rate, that at the end of the
eighteenth century the course had been changed in the West.
Since then, in spite of our occasional obstinacy in pretending
that we are the same, we have in fact entered a different world.
Firstly, economic changes. Advanced as it was in many
ways two centuries ago, our civilisation was still based funda-
mentally on the soil and its partition. The type of ' real ' pro-
perty, the nucleus of the family, the prototype of the state (and
even the universe) was still, as in the earliest days of society, the
arable field, the territorial basis. Then, little by little, as a result
of the ' dynamisation ' of money, property has evaporated into
something fluid and impersonal, so mobile that already the
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wealth of nations themselves has almost nothing in common with
their frontiers.
Secondly, industrial changes. Up to the eighteenth century,
in spite of the many improvements made, there was still only
one known source of chemical energy — fire. And there was
only one sort of mechanical energy employed — muscle, human
or animal, multiplied by the machine.
Lastly, social changes and the awakening of the masses.
Merely from looking at these external signs wc can hardly
fail to suspect that the great unrest which has pervaded our life
in the West ever since the storm of the French Revolution springs
from a nobler and deeper cause than the difficulties of a world
seeking to recover some ancient equilibrium that it has lost.
There is no question of shipwreck. What wc are up against is
the heavy swell of an unknown sea which we are just entering
from behind the cape that protected us. What is troubling us
intellectually, politicaUy and even spiritually is something quite
simple. With his customary acute intuition, Henri Breuil said
to me one day: ' We have only just cast off the last moorings
which held us to the Neolithic age.' The formula is paradoxical
but illuminating. In fact the more I have thought over these
words, the more inclined I have been to think that Breuil was
right.
We are, at this very moment, passing through a change of age.
The age of industry ; the age of oil, electricity and the atom ;
the age of the machine, of huge collectivities and of science —
the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era
we are entering. The word matters little. What does matter is
that wc should be told that, at the cost of what we arc enduring,
life is taking a step, and a decisive step, in us and in our environ-
ment. After the long maturation that has been steadily going
on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural centuries,
the hour has come at last, characterised by the birth pangs
inevitable in another change of state. There were the first men —
those who witnessed our origin. There are others who will
witness the great scenes of the end. To us, in our brief span of
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life, falls the honour and good fortune of coinciding with a
critical change of the noosphere.
In these confused and restless zones in which present blends
with future in a world of upheaval, we stand face to face with
all the grandeur, the unprecendented grandeur, of the pheno-
menon of man. Here if anywhere, now if ever, have we, more
legitimately than any of our predecessors, the right to think
that we can measure the importance and detect the direction of
the process of hominisation. Let us look carefully and try to
understand. And to do so let us probe beneath the surface and
try to decipher the particular form of mind which is coming
to birth in the womb of the earth today.
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with
work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations
— this great organism lives, in fmal analysis, only because of, and
for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath a change of age lies a change
of thought. Where arc we to look for it, where arc we to
situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without
appreciably changing our bodies, has made new creatures of
us ? In one place and one only — in a new intuition involving a
total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we
move — in other words, in an awakening.
What has made us in four or five generations so different
from our forebears (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious
too, and so worried, is not merely that wc have discovered and
mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am
not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement
which is carrying us along, and have thereby realised the for-
midable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human
effort.
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i. THE DISCOVERY OF EVOLUTION
A. The Perception of Space-time 1
We have all forgotten the moment when, opening our eyes for
the first time, we saw light and things around us all jumbled
up and all on one single plane. It requires a great effort to
imagine the time when we were unable to read or again to take
our minds back to the time when for us the world extended
no farther than the walls of our home and our family circle.
Similarly it seems to us incredible that men could have lived
without suspecting that the stars are hung above us hundreds of
light years away, or that the contours of life stretched out
millions of years behind us to the limits of our horizon. Yet
we have only to open any of those books with barely yellowing
pages in which the authors of the sixteenth, or even as late as
the eighteenth, century discoursed on the structure of worlds to
be startled by the fact that our great-great-great-grandfathers
felt perfectly at ease in a cubic space where the stars turned round
the earth, and had been doing so for less than 6,000 years. In a
cosmic atmosphere which would suffocate us from the first
moment, and in perspectives in which it is physically impossible
for us to enter, they breathed without any inconvenience, if not
very deeply.
Between them and us what, then, has happened ?
I know of no more moving story nor any more revealing of
the biological reality of a noogenesis than that of intelligence
struggling step by step from the beginning to overcome the
encircling illusion of proximity.
In the course of this struggle to master the dimensions and
the relief of the universe, space was the first to yield — naturally,
because it was more tangible. In fact the first hurdle was taken
in this field when long, long ago a man (some Greek, no doubt,
before Aristotle), bending back on itself the apparent flatness of
p Cf. Collingwood, Idea of Nature (O.U.P. 1944) passim]
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THE MODERN EARTH
things, had an intuition that there were antipodes. From then
onwards round the round earth the firmament itself rolled
roundly. But the focus of the spheres was badly placed. By
its situation it incurably paralysed the elasticity of the system.
It was only really in the time of Galileo, through rupture with
the ancient geocentric view, that the skies were made free for
the boundless expansions which we have since detected in them.
The earth became a mere speck of sidereal dust. Immensity
became possible, and to balance it the infinitesimal sprang into
existence.
For lack of apparent yardsticks, the depths of the past took
much longer to be plumbed. The movement of stars, the shape
of mountains, the chemical nature of bodies — indeed all matter
seemed to express a continual present. The physics of the
seventeenth century was incapable of opening Pascal's eyes to
the abysses of the past. To discover the real age of the earth
and then of the elements, it was necessary for man to become
fortuitously interested in an object of moderate mobility, such
as life, for instance, or even volcanoes. It was thus through a
narrow crack (that of natural history ', then in its infancy) that
from the eighteenth century onwards light began to seep down
into the great depths beneath our feet. In these initial estimates,
the time considered necessary for the formation of the world
was still very modest. But at least the impetus had been given
and the way out opened up. After the walls of space, shaken
by the Renaissance, it was the floor (and consequently the
ceiling) of time which, from Buffon onwards, became mobile.
Since then, under the unceasing pressure of facts, the process
has continually accelerated. Although the strain has been taken
off for close on two hundred years, the spirals of the world have
still not been relaxed. The distance between the turns in the spiral
has seemed ever greater and there have always been further turns
appearing deeper still.
Yet in these first stages in man's awakening to the immensi-
ties of the cosmos, space and time, however vast, still remained
homogeneous and independent of each other ; they were two
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great containers, quite separate one from the other, extending
infinitely no doubt, but in which things floated about or were
packed together in ways owing nothing to the nature of their
setting.
The two compartments had been enlarged beyond measure,
but within each of them the objects seemed as freely transpose
as before. It seemed as if they could be placed here or there,
moved forward, pushed back or even suppressed at will. If no-one
ventured formally as far as this play of thought, at least there was
still no clear idea why or to what extent it was impossible.
This was a question which did not arise.
It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century, again
under the influence of biology, that the light dawned at last,
revealing the irreversible coherence of all that exists. First the
concatenations of life and, soon after, those of matter The least
molecule is, in nature and in position, a function of the whole
sidereal process, and the least of the protozoa is structurally so
knit into the web of life that its existence cannot be hypothctically
annihilated without ipso facto undoing the whole network of the
biosphere. The distribution, succession and solidarity of objects
are bom from their concrescence iu a common genesis. Time and space
are organically joined again so as to weave, together, the stuff
of the universe. That is the point we have reached and how we
perceive things today.
Psychologically what is hidden behind this initiation ? One
might well become impatient or lose heart at the sight of so
many minds (and not mediocre ones either) remaining today
still closed to idea of evolution, if the whole of history were
not there to pledge to us that a truth once seen, even by a single
mind, always ends up by imposing itself on the totality of human
consciousness. For many, evolution is still only transformism,
and transformism is only an old Darwinian hypothesis as local
and as dated as Laplace's conception of the solar system or
Wegener's Theory of Continental Drift. Blind indeed are those
who do not see the sweep of a movement whose orbit infinitely
transcends the natural sciences and has successively invaded and
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conquered the surrounding territory — chemistry, physics, socio-
logy and even mathematics and the history of religions. One
after the other all the fields of human knowledge have been
shaken and carried away by the same under-watcr current in
the direction of the study of some development. Is evolution a
theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general
condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must
bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be
thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a
curve that all lines must follow.
In the last century and a half the most prodigious event,
perhaps, ever recorded by history since the threshold of reflection
has been taking place in our minds : the definitive access of
consciousness to a scale of new dimensions ; and in consequence
the birth of an entirely renewed universe, without any change
of line or feature by the simple transformation of its intimate
substance.
Until that time the world seemed to rest, static and fragment-
able, on the three axes of its geometry. Now it is a casting from
a single mould.
What makes and classifies a ' modern ' man (and a whole
host of our contemporaries is not yet ' modern ' in this sense)
is having become capable of seeing in terms not of space and
time alone, but also of duration, or — it comes to the same
thing — of biological space-time ; and above all having become
incapable of seeing anything otherwise — anything — not even
himself.
This last step brings us to the heart of the metamorphosis.
b. The Envelopment in Duration
Obviously man could not see evolution all around him without
feeling to some extent carried along by it himself. Darwin has
demonstrated this. Nevertheless, looking at the progress of
transformist views in the last hundred years, we are surprised
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to see how naively naturalists and physicists were able at the
early stages to imagine themselves to be standing outside the
universal stream they had just discovered. Almost incurably
subject and object tend to become separated from each other in
the act of knowing. We are continually inclined to isolate our-
selves from the things and events which surround us, as though
we were looking at them from outside, from the shelter of an
observatory into which they were unable to enter, as though
we were spectators, not elements, in what goes on. That is why,
when it was raised by the concatenations of life, the question of
man's origins was for so long restricted to the purely somatic
and bodily side. A long animal heredity might well have formed
our limbs, but our mind was always above the play of which it
kept the score. However materialistic they might be, it did not
occur to the first evolutionists that their scientific intelligence
had anything to do in itself with evolution.
At this stage they were only half-way to the truth they had
discovered. .
From the very first pages of this book, 1 have been relentlessly
insisting on one thing : for invincible reasons of homogeneity
and coherence, the fibres of cosmogenesis demand their pro-
longation in us in a way that goes far deeper than flesh and blood.
We are not only set adrift and carried away in the current of life
by the material surface of our being ; but, like a subtle fluid,
space-time first drowns our bodies and then penetrates to our
soul ; it fills it and impregnates it ; it blends itself with the
soul's potentialities to such an extent that soon the soul no
longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own
thoughts. To those who can use their eyes nothing, not even at
the summit of our being, can escape this flux any longer, because
it is only definable in increase of consciousness. The very act by
which the fine edge of our minds penetrates the absolute is a
phenomenon, as it were, of emergence. In short, first recognised
only at a single point, then perforce extended to the whole
inorganic and organic volume of matter, evolution is now,
whether we like it or not, gaining the psychic zones of the world
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THE MODERN EARTH
and transferring to the spiritual constructions of life not only the
cosmic stuff but also the cosmic ' primacy ' hitherto reserved by
science to the tangled whirlwind of the ancient ' ether'.
How indeed could we incorporate thought into the organic
flux of space-time without being forced to grant it the first place
in the processus ? How could we imagine a cosmogenesis
reaching right up to mind without being thereby confronted
with a noogenesis ?
Thus we see not only thought as participating in evolution
as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon ; but evolution as so
reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought
that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very
stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is
nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself, to borrow
Julian Huxley's striking expression. It seems to me that our
modern minds (because and inasmuch as they are modern)
will never find rest until they settle down to this view. On
this summit and on this summit alone are repose and illumination
waiting for us.
c. The Illumination
The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself
and reflecting upon itself.
With that very simple view, destined, as I suppose, to become
as instinctive and familiar to our descendants as the discovery
of a third dimension in space is to a baby, a new light — inex-
haustibly harmonious — bursts upon the world, radiating from
ourselves.
Step by step, from the early earth onwards, we have followed
going upwards the successive advances of consciousness in matter
undergoing organisation. Having reached die peak, we can
now turn round and, looking downwards, take in the pattern of
the whole. And this second check is decisive, the harmony
is perfect. From any other point of view, there is always a
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
' snag ' : something clashes, for there is no natural place no
generic place — for human thought in the landscape. Whereas
here, from top to bottom, from our souls and including our souls,
the lines stretch in both directions, untwisted and unbroken.
From top to bottom, a triple unity persists and develops : unity
of structure, unity of mechanism and unity of movement.
a. Unity of structure. ' Verticils ' and ' farmings out '.
On every scale, this is the pattern we see on the tree of life.
We found it again at the origins of mankind and of the principal
human waves. We have seen it with our own eyes today in the
complex ramifications of nations and races. And now, with an
eye rendered more sensitive by training, we shall be able to
discern the same pattern again in forms which are more and more
immaterial and near.
Our habit is to divide up our human world into compart-
ments of different sorts of ' realities ' : natural and artificial,
physical and moral, organic and juridical, for instance.
In a space-time, legitimately and perforce extended to
include the movements of the mind within us, the frontiers
between these pairs of opposites tend to vanish. Is there after all
such a great difference from the point of view of the expansion
of life between a vertebrate either spreading its limbs or equipping
them with feathers, and an aviator soaring on wings with which
he has had the ingenuity to provide himself ? In what way is the
ineluctable play of the energies of the heart less physically real
than the principle of universal attraction ? And, conventional
and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the
intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate litde by
litde what are one day to become the structural laws of the noo-
sphere ? In their essence, and provided they keep their vital
connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the
past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the
hominised versions of the natural, the physical and the organic ?
From this point of view, which is that of the future natural
history of the world, distinctions we cling to from habit (at
die risk of over-partitioning the world) lose their value. Hence
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the ramifications of evolution reappear and go on close to us in a
thousand social phenomena which we should never have imagined
to be so closely linked with biology ; in the formation and dis-
semination of languages, in the development and specialisation
of new industries, in the formulation and propagation of philo-
sophic and religious doctrines. In each of these groups of human
activity a superficial glance would only detect a weak and hap-
hazard reproduction of the procedures of life. It would accept
without questioning the strange fact of parallelism— or it would
account verbally for it in terms of some abstract necessity.
For a mind that has awakened to the full meaning of evolu-
tion, mere inexplicable similitude is resolved in identity— the
identity of a structure which, under different forms, extends
from the bottom to the top, from threshold to threshold, from
the roots to the flowers— by the organic continuity of move-
ment or, which amounts to the same thing, by the organic unity
of milieu.
The social phenomenon is the culmination and not the attenuation
of the biological phenomenon,
b. Unity of mechanism. ' Groping ' and ' invention '.
It was to these words that we turned instinctively when we
ran up against the facts of ' mutations ' in describing the appear-
ance of successive zoological groups.
What exactly are these words worth, imbued as they may
well be with anthropomorphism ?
Mutation reappears undeniably at the origin of the ramifi-
cations of institutions and ideas which interlace to form human
society. Everywhere around us it is constandy cropping up,
and precisely under the two forms that biology has divined and
between which it hesitates : on the one hand we have mutations
narrowly limited round a single focus ; on the other ' mass
mutations ' in which whole blocks of mankind are swept along as
by a flood. Here, however, because the phenomenon takes place
in ourselves with its procedure in full view, we cannot be
mistaken : we can see that in interpreting the progressive leaps
of life in an active and finalist way we are not in error. For if
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
our ' artificial ' constructions are really nothing but the legitimate
sequel to our phylogenesis, invention also — this revolutionary act
from which the creations of our thought emerge one after the
other — can legitimately be regarded as an extension in reflective
form of the obscure mechanism whereby each new form has
always germinated on the trunk of life.
This is no metaphor, but an analogy founded in nature. We
find the same thing in both — only it is easier to define in the
hominised state.
And so, here again, we find that light reflected on itself,
glancing off and in a flash descending to the lowest frontiers of
the past. But this time what its beam illuminates in us at our
lowest stages is no longer an endless play of tangled verticils, but
a long sequence of discoveries. In the same beam of light the
instinctive gropings of the first cell link up with the learned
gropings of our laboratories. So let us bow our heads with
respect for the anxieties and joys of ' trying all and discovering
all '. The passing wave that we can feci was not formed in
ourselves. It comes to us from far away ; it set out at the same
time as the light from the first stars. It reaches us after creating
everything on the way. The spirit of research and conquest is
the permanent soul of evolution.
c. And hence, throughout all time, unity of movement. ' The
rise and expansion of consciousness.'
Man is not the centre of the universe as once we thought in
our simplicity, but something much more wonderful — the arrow
pointing the way to the final unification of the world in terms of
life. Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most
complicated, the most subdc of all the successive layers of life.
This is nothing else than the fundamental vision and I shall
leave it at that.
But this vision, mind you, only acquires its full value — is
indeed only defensible — through the simultaneous illumination
within ourselves of the laws and conditions of heredity.
As I have already had occasion to say, we do not yet know
how characters are formed, accumulated and transmitted in the
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THE MODERN EARTH
secret recesses of the germ cells. Or rather, so long as it is talking
of plants and animals, biology has not yet found a way of recon-
ciling in phy ogenesis the spontaneous activity of individuals
with the blind determinism of the genes. In its inability to do
so it is inclined to make the living being the passive and power-
less witness of the transformations he undergoes-without being
able to influence them and without being responsible for them
But then (and this is the moment to settle the question once
and for all), m the phylogenesis of mankind, what becomes of
the part, obvious enough, played by the power of invention ?
What evolution perceives of itself in man by reflecting itself
m him is enough to dispel or at least to correct these paradoxical
appearances.
Certainly in our innermost being we all feel the weight,
the stock of obscure powers, good or bad, a sort of definite and
unalterable quantum * handed down to us once and for all
from the past. But with no less clarity we see that the further
advance of the vital wave beyond us depends on how industri-
ously we use those powers. How could we doubt this when
we see them directly before us, through all the channels of ' tradi-
tion , stored up irreversibly in the highest form of life accessible
to our expenence-I mean the collective memory and intelligence
of the human biota ? Ever under the influence of our tendency
to disparage the ' artificial ', we are apt to regard these social
functions— tradition, education and upbringing— as pale images,
almost parodies, of what takes place in the natural formation of
species. If the noosphere is not an illusion, is it not much more
exact to recognise in these communications and exchanges of
ideas the higher form, in which they come to be fixed in us, of
the less supple modes of biological enrichments by additivity?
In short, the further the living being emerges from the
anonymous masses by the radiation of his own consciousness,
the greater becomes the part of his activity which can be stored
up and transmitted by means of education and imitation. From
this point of view man only represents an extreme case of trans-
formation. Transplanted by man into the thinking layer of the
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THE PHENOMENON OP MAN
earth, heredity, without ceasing to be germinal (or chromo-
somatic) in the individual, finds itself, by its very life-centre,
settled in a reflecting organism, collective and permanent, in
which phylogenesis merges with ontogenesis. From the chain
of cells it passes into the circumterrestrial layers of the noosphere.
There is nothing surprising if from this moment onwards, and
thanks to the characters of this new milieu, it is reduced in its
finest part to the pure and simple transmission of acquired spiritual
treasures.
Passive as it may have been before reflection, heredity now
springs to life, supremely active, in its noospheric form — that is
to sav, by becoming hominised.
Hence we were not saying enough when we said that
evolution, by becoming conscious of itself in the depths of our-
selves, only needs to look at itself in the mirror to perceive itself
in all its depths and to decipher itself. In addition it becomes
free to dispose of itself— it can give itself or refuse itself. Not
only do we read in our slightest acts the secret of its proceedings ;
but for an elementary part we hold it in our hands, responsible
for its past to its future.
Is this grandeur or servitude ? Therein lies the whole problem
of action.
2. THE PROBLEM OF ACTION
A. Modern Disquiet
It is impossible to accede to a fundamentally new environment
without experiencing the inner terrors of a metamorphosis. The
child is terrified when it opens its eyes for the first time. Similarly,
for our mind to adjust itself to lines and horizons enlarged beyond
measure, it must renounce the comfort of familiar narrowness.
It must create a new equilibrium for everything that had formerly
been so neatly arranged in its small inner world. It is dazzled
when it emerges from its dark prison, awed to find itself suddenly
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THE MODERN EARTH
at the top of a tower, and it suffers from giddiness and disorienta-
tion. The whole psychology of modern disquiet is linked with
the sudden confrontation with space-time.
It cannot be denied that, in a primordial form, human anxiety
is bound up with the very advent of reflection and is thus as
old as man himself. Nor do I think that anyone can seriously
doubt the fact that, under the influence of reflection undergoing
socialisation, the men of today are particularly uneasy, more so
than at any other moment of history. Conscious or not, anguish
-a fundamental anguish of being-despite our smiles, strikes in
the depths of all our hearts and is the undertone of all our con-
versations. This does not mean that its cause is clearly recognised
-far from it. Something threatens us, something is more than
ever lacking, but without our being able to say exactly what.
Let us try then, step by step, to localise the source of our
disquiet, eliminating the illegitimate causes of disturbance till we
find the exact site of the pain at which the remedy, if there is one,
should be applied.
hi the first and most widespread degree, the ' malady of
space-tune ' manifests itself as a rule by a feeling of futility, of
being crushed by the enormities of the cosmos.
The enormity of space is the most tangible and thus the most
frightening aspect. Which of us has ever in his life really had the
courage to look squarely at and try to ' live * a universe formed
of galaxies whose distance apart runs into hundreds of thousands
of light years ? Which of us, having tried, has not emerged from
the ordeal shaken in one or other of his beliefs ? And who, even
when trying to shut his eyes as best he can to what the astronomers
implacably put before us, has not had a confused sensation of a
gigantic shadow passing over the serenity of his joy ?
Enormity of duration— sometimes having the effect of an
abyss on those few who are able to see it, and at other times
more usually (on those whose sight is poor), the despairing effect
of stability and monotony. Events that follow one anodier in
a circle, vague pathways which intertwine, leading nowhere.
Corresponding enormity of number— the bewildering number
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
of all that has been, is, and will be necessary to fill time and
space. An ocean in which we seem to dissolve all the more
irresistibly the more lucidly alive we are. The effort of trying
conscientiously to find our proper place among a thousand
million men. Or merely in a crowd.
Malady of multitude and immensity .. .
To overcome this first form of its uneasiness, I believe that
the modern world has no choice but to proceed unhesitatingly
right to the end of its intuition.
As motionless or blind (and by that I mean so long as we
think of them as motionless or blind) time and space are indeed
terrifying. Accordingly what could make our initiation into the
true dimensions of the world dangerous is for it to remain
incomplete, deprived of its complement and necessary corrective
—the perception of an evolution animating those dimensions.
On the other hand, what matters the giddy plurality of the stars
and their fantastic spread, if that immensity (symmetrical with
the infinitesimal) has no other function but to equilibrate the
intermediary layer where, and where only in the medium range of
size, life can build itself up chemically ? What matter the millions
of years and milliards of beings that have gone before if those
countless drops form a current that carries us along ? Our
consciousness would evaporate, as though annihilated, in the
limitless expansions of a static or endlessly moving universe.
It is inwardly reinforced in a flux which, incredibly vast as it may
be, is not only becoming but genesis, which is something quite
different. Indeed time and space become humanised as soon as a
definite movement appears which gives them a physiognomy.
' There is nothing new under the sun ' say the despairing.
But what about you, O thinking man ? Unless you repudiate
reflection, you must admit that you have climbed a step higher
than the animals. ' Very well, but at least nothing has changed
and nothing is changing any longer since the beginning of
history.' In that case, O man of the twentieth century, how does
it happen that you are waking up to horizons and are susceptible
to fears that your forefathers never knew ?
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THE MODERN EARTH
In truth, half our present uneasiness would be turned into
happiness if we could once make up our minds to accept the
facts and place the essence and the measure of our modern
cosmogonies within a noogenesis. Along this axis no doubt is
possible. The universe has always been in motion and at this
moment continues to be in motion. But will it still be in motion
tomorrow ?
Here only, at this turning point where the future substitutes
itself for the present and the observations of science should give
way to the anticipations of a faith, do our perplexities legitimately
and indeed inevitably begin. Tomorrow ? But who can guaran-
tee us a tomorrow anyway ? And without the assurance that
this tomorrow exists, can we really go on living, we to whom
has been given — perhaps for the first time in the whole story of
the universe — the terrible gift of foresight ?
Sickness of die dead end — the anguish of feeling shut in . . .
This time we have at last put our finger on the tender spot.
What makes the world in which we live specifically modern
is our discovery in it and around it of evolution. And I can
now add that what disconcerts the modern world at its very
roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be
sure, that there is an outcome — a suitable outcome — to that evolu-
tion.
Now what should the future be like in order to give us the
strength or even die joy to accept the prospect of it and bear
its weight ?
To come to grips with the problem and see if there is a
remedy, let us examine the whole situation.
b. The Requirements of the Future
There was a time when life held sway over none but slaves and
children. To advance, all it needed was to feed obscure instincts
— the bait of food, the urge of reproduction, the half-confused
struggle for a place in the sun, stepping over others, trampling
229
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
them down if need be. The aggregate rose automatically and
docile, as the resultant of an enormous sum of egoisms given
rein. There was a time too, almost within living memory,
when the workers and the disinherited accepted without reflec-
tion the lot which kept them in servitude to the remainder
of society.
Yet when the first spark of thought appeared upon the earth,
life found it had brought into the world a power capable of
criticising it and judging it. Tins formidable risk which long
lay dormant, but whose dangers burst out with our first awaken-
ing to the idea of evolution. Like sons who have grown up,
like workers who have become ' conscious ', we are discovering
that something is developing in the world by means of us,
perhaps at our expense. And what is more serious still is that
we have become aware that, in the great game that is being
played, we are the players as well as being the cards and the
stakes. Nothing can go on if we leave the table. Neither can
any power force us to remain. Is the game worth the candle, or
are we simply its dupes ? This question has hardly been formu-
lated as yet in man's heart, accustomed for hundreds of centuries
to toe the line ; it is a question, however, whose mere murmur,
already audible, infallibly predicts future rumblings. The last
century witnessed the first systematic strikes in industry ; the
next will surely not pass without the threat of strikes in the
noosphere.
There is a danger that the elements of the world should
refuse to serve the world — because they think ; or more pre-
cisely that the world should refuse itself when perceiving itself
through reflection. Under our modern disquiet, what is forming
and growing is nothing less than an organic crisis in evolution.
And now, at what price and on what contractual bases will
order be restored ? On all the evidence, that is the nub of the
problem.
In the critical disposition of mind we shall be in from now
on, one thing is clear. We shall never bend our backs to the
task that has been allotted us of pushing noogenesis onward except
230
THE MODERN EARTH
on condition that the effort demanded of us has a chance of
succeeding and of taking us as far as possible. An animal may
rush headlong down a blind alley or towards a precipice. Man
will never take a step in a direction he knows to be blocked.
There lies precisely the ill that causes our disquiet.
Having got so far, what are the minimum requirements to
be fulfilled before we can say that the road ahead of us is open ?
There is only one, but it is everything. It is that we should be
assured the space and the chances to fulfil ourselves, that is to
say, to progress till we arrive (directly or indirectly, individually
or collectively) at the utmost limits of ourselves. This is an
elementary request, a basic wage, so to speak, veiling neverthe-
less a stupendous demand. But is not the end and aim of thought
that still unimaginable farthest limit of a convergent sequence,
propagating itself without end and ever higher ? Does not the
end or confine of thought consist precisely in not having a
confine ? Unique in this respect among all the energies of the
universe, consciousness is a dimension to which it is inconceiv-
able and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling or to suppose
that it can double back upon itself. There are innumerable
critical points on the way, but a halt or a reversion is impossible,
and for the simple reason that every increase of internal vision
is essentially the germ of a further vision which includes all the
others and carries still farther on.
Hence this remarkable situation — that our mind, by the very
fact of being able to discern infinite horizons ahead, is only
able to move by the hope of achieving, through something of
itself, a supreme consummation — without which it would rightly
feel itself to be stunted, frustrated and cheated. By the nature
of the work, and correlativcly by the requirement [exyj
the worker, a total death, an unscalable wall, on which con-
sciousness would crash and then for ever disappear, are thus ' in-
compossible ' with the mechanism of conscious activity (since it
would immediately break its mainspring).
The more man becomes man, the less will he be prepared to
move except towards that which is interminably and indes-
231
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
tructibly new. Some ' absolute ' is implied in the very play of
his operative activity.
After that, ' positive and critical ' minds can go on saying as
much as they like that ihe new generation, less ingenuous than
their elders, no longer believes in a future and in a perfecting
of the world. Has it even occurred to those who write and
repeat these tilings that, if they were right, all spiritual move-
ment on earth would be virtually brought to a stop ? They
seem to believe that life would continue its peaceful cycle when
deprived of light, of hope and of the attraction of an inexhaust-
ible future. And this is a great mistake. Flowers and fruit might
still go on perhaps for a few years more by habit. But from
these roots the trunk would be well and truly severed. Even
on stacks of material energy, even under the spur of immediate
fear or desire, without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop
inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed
in advance. And, stricken at the very source of the impetus
which sustains it, it would disintegrate from nausea or revolt
and crumble into dust.
Having once known the taste of a universal and durable
progress, we can never banish it from our minds any more than
our intelligence can escape from the space-time perspective it
once has glimpsed.
If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work
involved we can say : ' What's the good of it all ? ' our efforts
will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a
halt — because we are evolution. 1
c. The Dilemma and the Choice
And now, by the very fact that we have measured the truly
cosmic gravity of the sickness that disquiets us, we are put in
1 There is no such thing as the ' energy of despair ' in spice of what is some-
times said. What those words really mean is a paroxysm of hope against hope.
All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope.
232
THE MODERN EARTH
possession of the remedy that can cure it. ' After the long series
of transformations leading to man, has the world stopped ? Or,
if we are still moving, is it not merely in a circle ? '
The answer to that uneasiness of the modern world springs
up by itself when we formulate the dilemma in which the
analysis of our action has imprisoned us.
Either nature is closed to our demands for futurity, in which
case thought, the fruit of millions of years of effort, is stifled,
still-born in a self-abortive and absurd universe. Or else an
opening exists— that of the super-soul above our souls ; but
in that case the way out, if we are to agree to embark on it, must
open out freely onto limitless psychic spaces in a universe to
which we can unhesitatingly entrust ourselves.
Between these two alternatives of absolute optimism or
absolute pessimism, there is no middle way because by its very
nature progress is all or nothing. We are confronted accordingly
with two directions and only two : one upwards and the
other downwards, and there is no possibility of finding a half-
way house.
On neither side is there any tangible evidence to produce.
Only, in support of hope, there are rational invitations to an
act of faith.
At this cross-roads where we cannot stop and wait because we
are pushed forward by life— and obliged to adopt an attitude
if we want to go on doing anything whatsoever — what are we
going freely to decide ?
To determine man's choice, in his famous wager, Pascal
loaded the dice with the lure of boundless gain. Here, when
one of die alternatives is weighted with logic and, in a sense,
by the promise of a whole world, can we still speak of a simple
game of chance ? Have we the right to hesitate ?
The world is too big a concern for that. To bring us into
existence it has from the beginning juggled miraculously with
too many improbabilities for there to be any risk whatever in
committing ourselves further and following it right to the end.
If it undertook the task, it is because it can finish it, following
233
BOOK FOUR
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
the same methods and with the same infallibility with which
it began.
In last analysis the best guarantee that a thing should happen
is that it appears to us as vitally necessary.
We have said that life, by its very structure, having once
been lifted to its stage of thought, cannot go on at all without
requiring to ascend ever higher.
This is enough for us to be assured of the two points of which
our action has immediate need.
The first is that there is for us, in the future, under some
form or another, at least collective, not only survival but also
super-life.
The second is that, to imagine, discover and reach this
superior form of existence, we have only to think and to walk
always further in the direction in which the lines passed by evolu-
tion take on their maximum coherence.
^34
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