object:4.01 - THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter
BOOK FOUR - SURVIVAL
CHAPTER ONE
THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
Preliminary Observation :
A Blind Alley to be Avoided : Isolation
When man has realised that he carries the world's fortune in
himself and that a limitless future stretches before him in which
lie cannot founder, his first reflex often leads him along the
dangerous course of seeking fulfilment in isolation.
In one example of this — flattering to our private egotism —
some innate instinct, justified by reflection, inclines us to think
that to give ourselves full scope we must break away as far as
possible from the crowd of others. Is it not in our aloofness from
our fellows, or alternatively in their subjection to ourselves,
that we will find that ' utmost limit of ourselves ' which is our
declared goal ? The study of the past teaches us that, with the
onset of reflection, an element partially liberated from phyletic
servitudes began to live for itself. So is it not in a line continuous
with that initial emancipation that further advance must lie?
To be more alone so as to increase one's being. Like some radiat-
ing substance, mankind would in this case culminate in a dust
of active, dissociated particles. This doubdess would not mean
diat a cluster of sparks would be extinguished in darkness, for
that would involve the total death whose hypothesis we have
just eliminated by our fundamental option. Rather it would
involve the hope that, in the long run, some rays, more pene-
trating or luckier than others, would finish up by finding the
path sought from the outset by consciousness, groping for
237
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
its consummation. Concentration by decentration from the
rest ; solitary, and by dint of solitude the elements of the noo-
sphere capable of being saved would find their salvation at the
extreme limit of, and by the very excess of, their individualisation.
It is rare around us for extreme individualism to go beyond
the bounds of a philosophy of immediate enjoyment and feel
the need to come to terms with the profound requirements of
action.
Less theoretical and less extreme, but all the more insidious,
is another doctrine of ' progress by isolation ' which, at this
very moment, is fascinating large sections of mankind — the
doctrine of the selection and election of races. Flattering to
collective egotism, keener, nobler and more easily aroused than
individual egotism, racialism lias the virtue in its perspectives
of accepting and extending rigorously, just as they occur, the
lines of the tree of life. What indeed does the history of the
animate world show us but a succession of ramifications, spring-
ing up one after the other, one on the top of the other, through
the success and domination of a privileged group ? And why
should we be exempt from the general rule ? Why should
there not be once again between us the struggle for life and the
survival of the fittest ; the trial of strength ? The super-man
should, like any other stem, be an offshoot from a single bud
of mankind.
Isolation of the individual or isolation of the group : here
we have two different forms of the same tactics, each seemingly
able to produce a plausible justification by pointing to the methods
pursued by life for its development right down to us.
We shall be seeing later wherein lies the attraction (or per-
versity) of these cynical and brutal theories in which, however,
a noble passion may also stir. We shall also see why, faced with
one or other of these calls to violence, we cannot help some-
times being deeply responsive. They involve a subtle deforma-
tion of a great truth.
What matters at the moment is to see clearly that those in
both groups deceive themselves, and us too, inasmuch as, ignoring
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THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
an essential phenomenon— the ' natural confluence of grains of
thought '—they disfigure or hide from our eyes the veritable
contours of the noosphere and render biologically impossible the
formation of a veritable spirit of the earth.
1. THE CONFLUENCE OF THOUGHT
A. Forced Coalescence
a. Coalescence of Elements. By their very nature, and at every
level of complexity, the elements of the world are able to influ-
ence and mutually to penetrate each other by their within, so
as to combine their ' radial energies ' in ' bundles '. While no
more than conjecturable in atoms and molecules, this psychic
interpenetrability grows and becomes directly perceptible in the
case of organised beings. Finally in man, in whom the effects of
consciousness attain the present maximum found in nature, it
reaches a high degree everywhere. It is written all over the
social phenomenon and is, of course, felt by us directly. But
at the same time, in this case also, it operates only in virtue of
the ' tangential energies ' of arrangement and thus under certain
conditions of spatial juxtaposition.
And here there intervenes a fact, commonplace at first sight,
but through which in reality there transpires one of the most
fundamental characteristics of the cosmic structure— the round-
ness of the earth. The geometrical limitation of a star closed, like
a gigantic molecule, upon itself. We have already regarded this
as a necessary feature at the origin of the first synthesis and
polymerisations on the early earth. Implictly, without our
having to say so, it has constantly sustained all the differentiations
and all the progress of the biosphere. But what are we to say of
its function in the noosphere ?
What would have become of humanity if, by some remote
chance, it had been free to spread indefinitely on an unlimited
surface, that is to say left only to the devices of its internal
239
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
affinities ? Something unimaginable, certainly something alto-
gether different from the modern world. Perhaps even nothing
at all, when we think of the extreme importance of the role
played in its development by the forces of compression.
Originally and for centuries there was no serious obstacle
to the human waves expanding over the surface of the globe ;
probably this is one of the reasons explaining the slowness of
their social evolution. Then, from the Neolithic age onwards,
these waves began, as we have seen, to recoil upon themselves.
All available space being occupied, the occupiers had to pack in
tighter. That is how, step by step, through the simple multiply-
ing effect of generations, we have come to constitute, as we do
at present, an almost solid mass of hominised substance.
Now, to the degree that — under the effect of this pressure
and thanks to their psychic permeability — the human elements
infiltrated more and more into each other, their minds (mysterious
coincidence) were mutually stimulated by proximity. And as
though dilated upon themselves, they each extended little by
little the radius of their influence upon this earth which, by the
same token, shrank steadily. What in fact do we see happening
in the modern paroxysm ? It has been stated over and over
again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the
motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man,
formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of
leagues or more. Better still : thanks to the prodigious biological
event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves,
each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively)
simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the
earth.
Thus, not only through the constant increase in the numbers
of its members, but also through the continual augmentation of
their area of individual activity, mankind — forced to develop
as it is in a confined area — has found itself relentlessly subjec-
ted to an intense pressure, a sclf-acccntuating pressure, because
each advance in it caused a corresponding expansion in each
element.
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THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
That is one of the first facts to keep in mind, or we shall
vitiate our picture of the future of the world.
Undeniably, quite apart from any hypothesis, the external
play of cosmic forces, when combined with the nature— so prone
to coalesce— of our thinking souls, operates towards a concen-
tration of the energies of consciousness ; and so powerful is
this effort that it even succeeds in subjugating the very con-
structions of phylogenesis— but wc shall be coming to that
presently.
b. Coalescence of the Branches. Twice already— once in developing
the theory and once in outlining the historic phases of anthro-
pogenesis— I called attention to the curious property, peculiar
to human lines of descent, of coming into contact and mixing with
each other, notably by means of their psychic sheath and social
institutions. The moment has now come to make a general
survey of the phenomenon and discover its ultimate significance.
What at first sight intrigues the naturalist when he tries to
ve the hominids— not merely in themselves, as anthropologists
usually do, but in comparison with other animal forms— is the
extraordinary elasticity of their zoological group. Outwardly
in man, the anatomical differentiation of a primitive type pursues
its course as everywhere in evolution. By genetic effects muta-
tions are produced. By climatic and geographical influences,
varieties and races come into existence. Somatically speaking,
the ' fanning-out ' is present continually in formation and per-
fecdy recognisable. Yet the remarkable thing is that its divergent
branches no longer succeed in separating. Under conditions of
distribution which in any other initial phylum would have led
long ago to the break up into different species, the human
verticil as it spreads out remains entire, like a gigantic leaf whose
veins, however distinct, remain always joined in a common
tissue. With man we find indefinite interfecundation on every
level, the blending of genes, anastomoses of races in civilisa-
tions or political bodies. Zoologically speaking, mankind
offers us the unique spectacle of a ' species ' capable of achiev-
ing something in which all previous species had failed It.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
has succeeded, not only in becoming cosmopolitan, but in
stretching a single organised membrane over the earth without
breaking it. .
To what should we attribute this strange condition it not to
a reversal, or more exactly a radical pcrfcctioning, of the ways
of life by the operation (at last, and only now possible) of a
powerful instrument of evolution-the coalescence upon itself of
an entire phylum ? . .
Here again, at the base of the process, lies the exiguity of
the earth on which the living stems are forced by their very
growth to writhe and intertwine their living branches like
ferried shoots of ivy. But this external contact was and would
always have remained insufficient to reach a point of conjunction
without the new ' binder ' conferred on the human biota by the
birth of reflection. Until man came, the most life had managed
to realise in the matter of association had been to gather socially
together on themselves, one by one, the finer extremities of the
same phylum. This resulted in essentially mechanical and family
groups created on a purely ' functional ' impulse of construction,
defence or propagation, such as the colony, the hive or the
ant-heap— all organisms whose power of association is limited
to the offspring of one single mother. From man onwards,
thanks to the universal framework or support provided by
thought, free rein is given to the forces of confluence. At the
heart of this new milieu, the branches themselves of one and
the same group succeed in uniting, or rather they become welded
together even before they have managed to separate off.
In this way the differentiation of groups in the course of
human phylogenesis is maintained up to a certain point, that is
to say so far as— by gropingly creating new types— it is a biologi-
cal condition of discovery and enrichment. After that (or at the
same time)— as happens on a sphere where the meridians separate
off at one pole only to come together at the other— this divergence
gives place to, and becomes subordinate to, a movement of
convergence in which races, peoples and nations consolidate one
another and complete one another by mutual fecundation.
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THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
Anthropologically, ethnically, socially, morally, we under-
stand nothing about man and can make no valid forecasts of
his future, so long as we fail to see that, in his case, ' ramifi-
cation ' (in so far as it still persists) works only with the aim
— and under higher forms — of agglomeration and convergence.
Formation of verticils, selection, struggle for life — henceforward
these are secondary functions, subordinate in man to a task of
cohesion, a furling back upon itself of a ' bundle ' of potential
species around the surface of the earth, a completely new mode
of phylogenesis. 1
B. Mega-Synthesis
The coalescence of elements and the coalescence of stems, the
spherical geometry of the earth and psychical curvature of the
mind harmonising to counterbalance the individual and collective
forces of dispersion in the world and to impose unification — there
at last we find the spring and secret of hominisation.
But why should there be unification in the world and what
purpose does it serve ?
To sec the answer to this ultimate question, we have only
to put side by side the two equations which have been gradually
formulating themselves from the moment we began trying to
situate the phenomenon of man in the world.
Evolution= Rise of consciousness,
Rise of consciousness= Union effected.
The general gathering together in which, by correlated
actions of the without and the within of the earth, the totality of
thinking units and thinking forces are engaged — the aggregation
in a single block of a mankind whose fragments weld together
and interpenetrate before our eyes in spite of (indeed in pro-
portion to) their efforts to separate — all this becomes intelligible
from top to bottom as soon as we perceive it as the natural
culmination of a cosmic processus of organisation which has
1 This is what I have called elsewhere ' the human Planetisation '.
243
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
never varied since those remote ages when our planet was young.
First the molecules of carbon compounds with their thousands
of atoms symmetrically grouped ; next the cell which, within a
very small volume, contains thousands of molecules linked in a
complicated system ; then the metazoa in which the cell is no
more than an almost infinitesimal element ; and later the mani-
fold attempts made sporadically by the metazoa to enter into
symbiosis and raise themselves to a higher biological condi-
tion.
And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes
the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and inter-
twines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to
reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.
Really I can see no coherent, and therefore scientific, way
of grouping this immense succession of facts but as a gigantic
psycho-biological operation, a sort of mega-synthesis, the ' super-
arrangement ' to which all the thinking elements of the earth
find themselves today individually and collectively subject.
Mega-synthesis in the tangential, and therefore and thereby
a leap forward of the radial energies along the principal axis of
evolution : ever more complexity and thus ever more con-
sciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we
need to convince ourselves of the vital error hidden in the depths
of any doctrine of isolation ? The egocentric ideal of a future
reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the
extremity of everyone for himself' is false and against nature.
No element could move and grow except with and by all the
others with itself.
Also false and against nature is the racial ideal of one branch
draining off for itself alone all the sap of the tree and rising
over the death of other branches. To reach the sun nothing less
is required than the combined growth of the entire foliage.
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry
into the super-human — these are not thrown open to a few of
the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all
others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a
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THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
direction in which all together* can join and find completion in a
spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical
degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we
must make clearer.
2. THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH
A. Mankind
Mankind : the idea of mankind was the first image in terms
of which, at the very moment that he awoke to the idea of
progress, modern man must have tried to reconcile the hopes of
an unlimited future with which he could no longer dispense with
the perspective of the inevitability of his own unavoidable
individual death. ' Mankind ' was at first a vague entity, felt
rather than thought out, in which an obscure feeling of perpetual
growth was allied to a need for universal fraternity. Mankind was
the object of a faith that was often naive but whose magic, being
stronger than all vicissitudes and criticisms, goes on working with
persuasive force upon the present-day masses and on the 'intelli-
gentsia ' alike. Whether one takes part in the cult or makes
fun of it, even today no-one can escape being haunted or even
dominated by the idea of mankind.
In the eyes of the ' prophets ' of the eighteenth century, the
world appeared really as no more than a jumble of confused
and loose relationships ; and the divination of a believer was
required to feel the beating heart of that sort of embryo Now
less than two hundred years later, here we are penetrating
(though hardly conscious of the fact) into the reality, at any rate
the material reality, of what our fathers expected. In the course
of a few generations all sorts of economic and cultural links have
been forged around us and they are multiplying in geometric
progression. Nowadays, over and above the bread which to
simple Neolithic man symbolised food, each man demands his
1 Even if they do so only under the influence of a few, an ilite.
245
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
daily ration of iron, copper and cotton, of electricity, oil and
radium, of discoveries, of the cinema and of international news.
It is no longer a simple field, however big, but the whole earth
which is required to nourish each one of us. If words have any
meaning, is this not like some great body which is being born
—with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its
memory— the body in fact of that great Thing which had to
come to fulfil the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by
the newly acquired consciousness that he was at one with and
responsible to an evolutionary All ?
Indeed, following logically upon our effort to co-ordinate
and organise the lines of the world, it is to an outlook recalling
the initial intuition of the first philanthropists that our minds
constantly return, with the elimination of individualist and racial
heresies. No evolutionary future awaits man except in associa-
tion with all other men. The dreamers of yesterday glimpsed
that. And in a sense we see the same tiling. But what we are
better able to perceive, because we stand on their shoulders, are
its cosmic roots, its particular physical substance, and finally the
specific nature of this mankind of which they could only have
a presentiment— and which we cannot overlook unless we shut
our eyes.
Cosmic roots. For the earliest humanitarians, man, in uniting
with liis fellows, was following a natural precept whose origins
people hardly bothered to analyse and hence to measure their
gravity. In those days, was not nature still treated as a personage
or as a poetic metaphor ? What she required of us at a particular
time she might have just thought up yesterday and perhaps
would no longer want tomorrow. For us, more aware of the
dimensions and structural demands of the world, the forces
which converge upon us from without or arise from within
and drive us ever closer together, are losing any semblance of
arbitrariness and any danger of instability.
Mankind was a fragile and even fictitious construction so
long as it could only have a limited, plural and disjointed cosmos
as a setting ; but it becomes consistent and at the same time
246
THE COLLECTIVE ISSUB
probable as soon as it is brought within the compass of a biological
space-time and appears as a continuation of the very lines of the
universe amongst other realities as vast as itself.
Physical stuff. For many of our contemporaries, mankind
still remains something unreal, unless materialised in an absurd
way. For some it is only an abstract entity or even a mere
conventional expression ; for others it becomes a closely-knit
organic group in which the social element can be transcribed
literally in terms of anatomy and physiology. It appears either
as a general idea, a legal entity, or else as a gigantic animal. In
both views we find the same inability, by default or by excess,
to think the whole correctly. Does not the only way out of this
dead-end lie in introducing boldly into our intellectual frame-
work yet another category to serve for the super-individual ?
After all, why not ? Geometry, at first constructed on rational
conceptions of size, would have remained stationary if it had
not in the end accepted ' e ', tc, and other incommensurables
as being just as complete and intelligible as any whole number.
The calculus would never have resolved the problems posed by
modern physics if it had not constantly continued to conceive
new functions. For identical reasons biology would not be able
to generalise itself on the dimensions of the whole of life without
introducing into the scale of values that it now needs to deal
with certain stages of being which common experience has
hitherto been able to ignore — and in particular that of the collective.
Yes, from now on we envisage, beside and above individual
realities, the collective realities that arc not reducible to the com-
ponent clement, yet are in their own way as objective as it is.
Is it not in this way that I have been inescapably forced to write
so as to translate the movements of life into concepts ?
Phyla, layers, branches, etc. . . .
To the eye that has become adjusted to the perspectives of
evolution, the directed groups of phyla, layers, branches, etc.
become perforce as clear, as physically real, as any isolated
object. And in this particular class of dimensions mankind
naturally takes its place. But, for it to become reprcsentable to
247
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
us, it is enough that by a mental re-orientation we should reach
the point of seeing it directly, exactly as it is, widiout attempt-
ing to put it into terms of anything simpler which we know
^Specific nature. Here, lastly, we pickup the problem again
at the point at which the realisation of the confluence of human
thoughts had already led us. Being a collective reahty and
therefore sui generis, mankind can only be understood to the
extent that, leaving behind it. body of tangible constructions,
we try to determine the particular type of conscious synthesis
emerging from its laborious and industrious concentration. It
is in the last resort only definable as a mind.
Now from this point of view and in the present condition of
things, there are two ways, through two stages, in which we can
picture the form mankind will assume tomorrow-either (and
this is simpler) as a common power and act of knowing and doing,
or (and this goes much deeper) as an organic superaggregation
of souls. In short : science or unanimity.
b. Science
Taken in the full modern sense of the word, science is the twin
sister of mankind. Born together, the two ideas (or two dreams)
grew up together to attain an almost religious valuation in the
course of the last century. Subsequently they fell together into
the same disrepute. But that does not prevent them, when
mutually supporting one another as they do from continuing
to represent (in fact more than ever) the ideal forces upon winch
our imagination falls back whenever it seeks to materialise in
terrestrial form its reasons for believing and hoping.
The future of science ... As a first approximanon it is out-
lined on our horizon as the establishment of an overall and
completely coherent perspective of the universe There was a
time when the only part ascribed to knowledge lay in lighting
up for our speculative pleasure the objects ready made and given
24 8
THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
around us. Nowadays, thanks to a philosophy which has given a
meaning and a consecration to our thirst to think all things, we
can glimpse that unconsciousness is a sort of ontological inferiority
or evil, since the world can only fulfil itself in so far as it expresses
itself in a systematic and reflective perception. Even (above all,
maybe) in mathematics, is not ' discovery ' the bringing into
existence of something new ? From this point of view, intellec-
tual discovery and synthesis are no longer merely speculation
but creation. Therefore, some physical consummation of things
is bound up with the explicit perception we make of them. And
therefore, they are (at least partially) right 1 who situate the crown
of evolution in a supreme act of collective vision obtained by a
pan-human effort of investigation and construction. 8
Knowledge for its own sake. But also, and perhaps still more,
knowledge for power.
Since its birth, science has made its greatest advances when
stimulated by some particular problem of life needing a solution ;
and its most sublime theories would always have drifted, rootless,
on the flood of human thought if they had not been promptly
incorporated into some way of mastering the world. Accordingly
the march of humanity, as a prolongation of that of all other
animate forms, develops indubitably in the direction of a con-
quest of matter put to the service of mind. Increased power for
increased action. But, finally and above all, increased action for
increased being.
Of old, the forerunners of our chemists strove to find the
philosophers' stone. Our ambition has grown since then. It is
no longer to make gold but life ; and in view of all that has
happened in the last fifty years, who would dare to say that this
1 Is not this one of Brunschvig's ideas ?
* One might say that, by virtue of human reflection (both individual and
collective), evolution, overflowing the physico-chemical organisation of
bodies, turns back upon itself and thereby reinforces itself (see note following)
■with a new organising power vastly concentric to the first — the cognitive
organisation of the universe. To think ' the world ' (as physics is beginning
to realise) is not merely to register it but to confer upon it a form of unity it
would otherwise (i.e. without being thought) be without.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
is a mere mirage? With our knowledge of hormones we appear
to be on the eve of having a hand in the development of our
bodies and even of our brains. With the discovery of genes it
appears that we shall soon be able to control the mechanism of
organic heredity. And with the synthesis of albuminoids immi-
nent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the
earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce : a new
wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life. 1 Immense
and prolonged as the universal groping has been since the begin-
ning, many possible combinations have been able to slip through
die fingers of chance and have had to await man's calculated
efforts in order to appear. Thought might artificially perfect the
thinking instrument itself ; life might rebound forward under
the collective effect of its reflection. The dream upon which
human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of master-
ing, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate
energy of which all other energies are merely servants ; and thus,
by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller
of the world.
I salute those who have the courage to admit that their hopes
extend that far ; they are at the pinnacle of mankind ; and I
would say to them that there is less difference than people think
between research and adoration. But there is a point I would
like them to note, one that will lead us gradually to a more
complete form of conquest and adoration. However far science
pushes its discovery of the ' essential fire ' and however capable
it becomes some day of remodelling and perfecting the human
element, it will always find itself in the end facing the same
problem — how to give to each and every element its final value
by grouping them in the unity of an organised whole.
1 It is what I have called ' the human rebound ' of evolution as correlative and
conjugated with Planet isat ion.
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THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
c. Unanimity
sunder Tt the ,f rm mC &-^ h ™- Within a better under-
De Z 2 f ^ u"™' " SCemS t0 me that the word ^uld
be understood without attenuation or metaphors when applied
homo. SUni hUma " bemgS " The UIUVerse is Warily
homogeneous in .ts nature and dimensions. Would it still be
rLlitv n PS SFral l0St ° nC j0t ° r titde of ^ir dc g'ee of
uTaL^Tl ° nS1St T C l 'I aSCendmg CVer hi 8 her ? T& "ill
unnamed Thing wbch the gradual combination of individuals,
peoples and races will bring into existence, must needs be
sup'a-phystcal, not infra-physical, if it is to be coherent with the
rest. Deeper than the common act in which it expresses itself
more important than the common power of action from which
by the living reunion of reflective particles
ibleWlt^ ^ t^" 1011111 t0 l[nQt < and ]t » q«tc cred-
ible) that the stuff of the universe, by becoming thinking has
not yet completed its evolutionary cycle, and that we are rWo£
moving forward towards some new critical point that hes ahead
In spite of its organic links, whose existence has everwhere'
become apparent to us, the biosphere has so far been no more
than a network of divergent line. f rec at their extremities. By
effect of reflection and the recoils it involves, the loose ends
have been tied up, and the noosphere tends to constitute a
single closed system „, which each element sees, feels, desires
^suffers for itself the same things as all the others at the same
We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of conscious-
nesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is
that of the earth not only becoming covered by mynads of
grains of thought but becoming enclosed in a single thinking
envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast
grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual
251
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one
another in the act of a single unanimous reflection.
This is the general form in which, by analogy and in sym-
metry with the past, we are led scientifically to envisage the
future of mankind, without whom no terrestrial issue is open
to the terrestrial demands of our action.
To the common sense of the ' man in the street ' and even
to a certain philosophy of the world to which nothing is possible
save what has always been, perspectives such as these will seem
highly improbable. But to a mind become familiar with the
fantastic dimensions of the universe they will, on the contrary,
seem quite natural, because they are simply proportionate with
the astronomical immensities.
In the direction of thought, could the universe terminate
with anything less than the measureless — any more than it could
in the direction of time and space ?
One thing at any rate is sure — from the moment we adopt
a thoroughly realistic view of the noosphere and of the hyper-
organic nature of social bonds, the present situation of the world
becomes clearer ; for we find a very simple meaning for the
profound troubles which disturb the layer of mankind at this
moment.
The two-fold crisis whose onset began in earnest as early as
the Neolithic age and which rose to a climax in the modern
world, derives in the first place from a mass-formation (we might
call it a ' planetisation ') of mankind. Peoples and civilisations
reached such a degree either of frontier contact or economic
interdependence or psychic communion that they could no
longer develop save by interpenetration of one another. But it
also arises out of the fact that, under the combined influence of
machinery and the super-heating of thought, we are witnessing
a formidable upsurge of unused powers. Modern man no longer
knows what to do with the time and the potentialities he has
unleashed. We groan under the burden of this wealth. We
are haunted by the fear of ' unemployment '. Sometimes we
are tempted to trample this super-abundance back into the
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THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE
matter from which it sprang without stopping to think how
impossible and monstrous such an act against nature would be.
When we consider the increasing compression of elements
at the heart of a free energy which is also relentlessly increasing,
how can we fail to see in this two-fold phenomenon the two
perennial symptoms of a leap forward of the * radial '—that is
to say, of a new step in the genesis of mind ?
In order to avoid disturbing our habits we seek in vain to
settle international disputes by adjustments of frontiers— or we
treat as ' leisure ' (to be whiled away) the activities at the disposal
of mankind. As things are now going it will not be long before
we run full tilt into one another. Something will explode if
we persist in trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts
the material and spiritual forces that are henceforward on the
scale of a world.
A new domain of psychical expansion— that is what we lack.
And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to
look at it.
Peace through conquest, work in joy. These are waiting for
us beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires,
in an interior totalisation of the world upon itself, in the unani-
mous construction of a spirit of the earth.
How is it then that our first efforts towards this great goal
seem merely to take us farther from it ?
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