object:4.02 - BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE - THE HYPER-PERSONAL
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter
CHAPTER TWO
BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE:
THE HYPER-PERSONAL
Another Preliminary Observation
A Feeling to be overcome : Discouragement
The reasons behind the scepticism regarding mankind which is
fashionable among ' enlightened ' people today are not merely
of a representative order. Even when the intellectual difficulties
of the mind in conceiving the collective and visualising space-
time have been overcome, we are left with another and perhaps
a still more serious form of hesitation which is bound up with
the incoherent aspect presented by the world of men today.
The nineteenth century had lived in sight of a promised land.
It thought that we were on the threshold of a Golden Age,
lit up and organised by science, warmed by fraternity. Instead
of that, we find ourselves slipped back into a world of spreading
and ever more tragic dissension. Though possible and even
perhaps probable in theory, the idea of a spirit of the earth
does not stand up to the test of experience. No, man will never
succeed in going beyond man by uniting with himself. That
Utopia must be abandoned as soon as possible and there is no
more to be said.
To explain or efface the appearances of a setback which, if
it were true, would not only dispel a beautiful dream but encour-
age us to weigh up a radical absurdity of the universe, I would
like to point out in the first place that to speak of experience—
of the results of experience— in such a connection is premature
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to say the least of it. After alJ half a million years, perhaps even
a million, were required for life to pass from the pre-hominids
to modern man. Should we now start wringing our hands
because, less than two centuries after glimpsing a higher state,
modern man is still at loggerheads with himself ? Once again
we have got things out of focus. To have understood the
immensity around us, behind us, and in front of us is already
a first step. But if to this perception of depth another perception,
that of sloivness, be not added, we must realise that the trans-
position of values remains incomplete and that it can beget for
our gaze nothing but an impossible world. Each dimension
has its proper rhythm. Planetary movement involves planetary
majesty. Would not humanity seem to us altogether static if,
behind its history, there were not the endless stretch of its pre-
history ? Similarly, and despite an almost explosive acceleration
of noogenesis at our level, we cannot expect to see the earth
transform itself under our eyes in the space of a generation.
Let us keep calm and take heart.
In spite of all evidence to the contrary, mankind may very
well be advancing all round us at the moment — there are in
fact many signs whereby we can reasonably suppose that it is
advancing. But, if it is doing so, it must be — as is the way with
very big tilings — doing so almost imperceptibly.
This point is of the utmost importance and must never be
lost sight of. To have made it does not, however, allay the most
acute of our fears. After all we need not mind very much if
the light on the horizon appears stationary. What does matter
is when it seems to be going out. If only we could believe that
we were merely motionless ! But does it not sometimes seem
that we are actually being blocked in our advance or even
swallowed up from behind — as though we were in the grip of
some ineluctable forces of mutual repulsion and materialisation.
Repulsion. I have spoken of the formidable pressures which
hem in the human particles in the present-day world, both
individuals and peoples being forced in an extreme way, geo-
graphically and psychologically, up against one another. Now
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
the strange fact is that, in spite of the strength of these energies
bringing men together, thinking units do not seem capable of
falling within their radius of internal attraction. Leaving aside
individual cases, where sexual forces or some extraordinary and
transitory common passion come into play, men are hostile or
at least closed to one another. Like a powder whose particles,
however compressed, refuse to enter into molecular contact,
deep down men exclude and repel one another with all their
might : unless (and this is worse still) their mass forms in such
a way that, instead of the expected mind, a new wave of deter-
minism surges up — that is to say, of materiality.
Materialisation. Here I am not only thinking of the laws of
large numbers which, irrespective of their secret ends, enslave
by structure each newly-formed multitude. As with every other
form of life, man, to become fully man, had to become legion.
And, before becoming organised, a legion is necessarily prey to
the play, however directed it be, of chance and probability. There
are imponderable currents which, from fashion and rates of
exchange to political and social revolutions, make us all the
slaves of the obscure seethings of the human mass. However
spiritualised we suppose its elements to be, every aggregate of
consciousness, so long as it is not harmonised, envelops itself
automatically (at its own level) with a veil of ' neo-matter ',
superimposed upon all other forms of matter — matter, the
' tangential ' aspect of every living mass in course of unification.
Of course we must react to such conditions ; but with the
satisfaction of knowing that they are only the sign of and price
paid for progress. But what are we to say of the other slavery,
the one which gains ground in the world in very proportion to
the efforts we make to organise ourselves ?
At no previous peripd of history has mankind been so well
equipped nor made such efforts to reduce its multitudes to order.
We have ' mass movements ' — no longer the hordes streaming
down from the forests of the north or the steppes of Asia, but
' the Million ' scientifically assembled. The Million in rank and
file on the parade ground ; the Million standardised in the
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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL
factory ; the Million motorised— and all this enly ending up
with Communism and National-Socialism and the most ghastly
fetters. So we get the crystal instead of the cell ; the ant-hill
instead of brotherhood. Instead of the upsurge of consciousness
which we expected, it is mechanisation that seems to emerge
inevitably from totalisation.
'Eppur si muove ! '
In the presence of such a profound perversion of the rules
of noogenesis, I hold that our reaction should be not one of
despair but of a determination to re-examine ourselves. When
an energy runs amok, the engineer, far from questioning the
power itself, simply works out his calculations afresh to see how
it can be brought better under control. Monstrous as it is, is
not modern totalitarianism really the distortion of something
magnificent, and thus quite near to the truth ? There can be no
doubt of it : the great human machine is designed to work and
must work— by producing a super-abundance of mind. If it does
not work, or rather if it produces only matter, this means that
it has gone into reverse.
Is it not possible that in our theories and in our acts we have
neglected to give due place to the person and the forces of
personalisation ?
i. THE CONVERGENCE OF THE PERSON
AND THE OMEGA POINT
A. The Personal Universe
Unlike the primitives who gave a face to every moving thing, or
the early Greeks who defined all the aspects and forces of nature,
modern man is obsessed by the need to depersonalise (or im-
personalise) all that he most admires. There are two reasons
for this tendency, The first is analysis, that marvellous instru-
ment of scientific research to which we owe all our advances
but which, breaking down synthesis after synthesis, allows on
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
soul after another to escape, leaving us confronted with a pile of
dismantled machinery, and evanescent particles. The second
reason lies in the discovery of the sidereal world, so vast that ,t
seems to do away with all proportion between our own being
and the dimensions of the cosmos around us. Only one reality
seems to survive and be capable of succeeding and spanning the
infinitesimal and the immense: energy-that floating universal
entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as
into an ocean ; energy, the new spirit ; the new god. So, at the
world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal
Under the influence of such impressions as these, it looks
as though we have lost both respect for the person and under-
standing of his true nature. We end up by admitting that to
be pivoted on oneself, to be able to say ' I', is the privilege (or
rather the blemish) of the element in the measure to which the
latter closes the door on all the rest and succeeds in setting him-
self up at the antipodes of the All. In the opposite direction we
conceive the ' ego ' to be diminishing and eliminating itself,
with the trend to what is most real and most lasting m the
world namely the Collective and the Universal. Personality is
seen as a specifically corpuscular and ephemeral property ; a
prison from which we must try to escape.
Intellectually, that is more or less where we stand today.
Yet if we try, as I have done in this essay, to pursue the
Wic and coherence of facts to the very end, we seem to be
led to the precisely opposite view by the notions of space-time
and evolution.
We have seen and admitted that evolution is an ascent
towards consciousness. That is no longer contested even by the
most materialistic, or at all events by the most agnostic of
humanitarians. Therefore it should culminate forwards in some
sort of supreme consciousness. But must not that consciousness,
if it is to be supreme, contain in the highest degree what is the
perfection of our consciousness-thc illuminating involution ot
the being upon itself ? It would manifestly be an error to extend
the curve of hominisation in the direction of a state of diffusion.
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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL
It is only in the direction of hyper-reflection — that is to say,
hyper-pcrsonalisation— that thought can extrapolate itself.
Otherwise how could it garner our conquests which are all made
in the field of what is reflected ? At first sight we arc disconcerted
by the association of an Ego with what is the All. The utter
disproportion of the two terms seems flagrant, almost laughable.
That is because we have not sufficiently meditated upon the
three-fold property possessed by every consciousness : (i) of
centring everything partially upon itself ; (ii) of being able to
centre itself upon itself constantly ; and (iii) of being brought more
by this very super-centration into association with all the other
centres surrounding it. Are we not at every instant living the
experience of a universe whose immensity, by the play of our
senses and our reason, is gathered up more and more simply in
each one of us ? And in the establishment now proceeding
through science and the philosophies of a collective human
Weltanschauung in which every one of us co-operates and
participates, are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an
aggregation of a still higher order, the birth of some single
centre from die convergent beams of millions of elementary
centres dispersed over the surface of the thinking earth ?
All our difficulties and repulsions as regards the opposition
between the All and the Person would be dissipated if only we
understood that, by structure, the noosphere (and more generally
the world) represent a whole that is not only closed but also
centred. Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-
time is necessarily oja convergent nature. Accordingly its enormous
layers, followed in die right direction, must somewhere ahead
become involuted to a point which we might call Omega, which
fuses and consumes them integrally in itself. However immense
the sphere of the world may be, it only exists and is finally
perceptible in the directions in which its radii meet — even if
this were beyond time and space altogether. Better still : the
more immense this sphere, the richer and deeper and hence the
more conscious is the point at which the ' volume of being '
that it embraces is concentrated ; because the mind, seen from
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
our side, is essentially the power of synthesis and organisation.
Seen from this point of view, the universe, without losing
any of its immensity and thus without suffering any anthro-
pomorphism, begins to take shape : since to think it, undergo it
and make it act, it is beyond our souls that we must look, not the
othe, way round. In the perspective of a noogenesis, time and
space become truly humanised^r rather super-humanised. Far
from being mutually exclusive, the Universal and Personal
(that is to say, the ' centred ') grow in the same direction and
culminate simultaneously in each other.
It is therefore a mistake to look for the extension ot our
being or of the noosphere in the Impersonal. The Future-
Universal could not be anything else but the Hyper-Personal-
at the Omega Point.
b. The Personalising Universe
Personalisation. It is by this internal deepening of consciousness
upon itself that we have characterised (Book III, Chapter I,
Section I) the particular destiny of the element that has become
fully itself by crossing the threshold of reflection— and there,
a regards the fate of individual human beings-we brought our
inquiry to a provisional halt. Personalisation : the same type
of progress reappears here, but this time it defines the collective
future of totalised grains of thought. There is an identical
function for the element as for the sum of the elements brought
together in a synthesis. How can we conceive and foresee that
the two movements harmonise ? How, without being impeded
or deformed, can the innumerable particular curves be inscribed
or even prolonged in their common envelope ?
The time has come to tackle this problem, and, for that pur-
pose to analyse still further the nature of the personal centre of
convergence upon whose existence hangs the evolutionary
equilibrium of the noosphere. What should this higher pole of
evolution be, in order to fulfil its role ?
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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PESSON AL
It is by definition in Omega that — in its flower and its integrity
— the hoard of consciouness liberated little by little on earth
by noogenesis adds itself together and concentrates. So much
has already been accepted. But what exactly do we mean, what
is implied, when we use the apparently simple phrase 'addition
of consciousness ' ?
When we listen to the disciples of Marx, we might think
it was enough for mankind (for its growth and to justify the
sacrifices imposed on us) to gather together the successive
acquisitions we bequeath to it in dying — our ideas, our dis-
coveries, our works of art, our example. Surely this imperish-
able treasure is the best part of our being.
Let us reflect a moment, and we shall soon see that for a
universe which, by hypothesis, we admitted to be a ' collector
and custodian of consciousness ', the mere hoarding of these
remains would be nothing but a colossal wastage. What passes
from each of us into the mass of humanity by means of invention,
education and diffusion of all sorts is admittedly of vital impor-
tance. I have sufficiently tried to stress, its phylctic value and no
one can accuse me of belittling it. But with that accepted, I am
bound to admit that, in these contributions to the collectivity,
far from transmitting the most precious, we are bequeathing, at
the utmost, only the shadow of ourselves. Our works ? But
even in the interest of life in general, what is the work of works
for man if not to establish, in and by each one of us, an absolutely
original centre in which the universe reflects itself in a unique
and inimitable way ? And those centres are our very selves and
personalities. The very centre of our consciousness, deeper than
all its radii ; that is the essence which Omega, if it is to be truly
Omega, must reclaim. And this essence is obviously not some-
thing of which we can dispossess ourselves for the benefit of
others as we might give away a coat or pass on a torch. For we
are the very flame of that torch. To communicate itself, my ego
must subsist through abandoning itself or the gift will fade away.
The conclusion is inevitable that the concentration of a conscious
universe would be unthinkable if it did not reassemble in itself
261
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious; each particular
consaousness remaining conscious of itself at the end of the opera-
tion and even (this must absolutely be understood) each part cul r
consaousness becoming sail more itself and thus more clearly
distinct from others the closer it gets to them in Omega.
The exaltation, not merely the conservation, of elements by
convergence : what, after all, could be more simple, and more
thoroughly in keeping with all we know ?
In any domain-whetber it be the cells of a body the mem-
bers of a society or the elements of a spiritual synthesis-««.o»
differentiates. In every organised whole, the parts perfect them-
selves and fulfil themselves. Through neglect of this universal
rule many a system of pantheism has led us astray to the cult
of a great All in which individuals were supposed to be merged
like a drop in the ocean or like a dissolving grain of salt. Applied
to the case of the summation of consciousnesses, the law of union
rids us of this perilous and recurrent illusion. No, following the
confluent orbits of their centres, the grains of consaousness do
not tend to lose their outlines and blend, but on the contrary,
to accentuate the depth and incommunicabilitv of their egos.
The more ' other ' they become in conjunction, the more they
find themselves as ' self. How could it be otherwise since they
are steeped in Omega? Could a centre dissolve? Or r«h£
would not its particular way of dissolving be to supercentrahse
^'Thus under the influence of these two factors-the essential
immiscibikty of consciousnesses, and the natural mechanism of
all unification-the only fashion in which we could correctly
express the final state of a world undergoing psychical con-
centration would be as a system whose unity coincides with a
paroxysm of harmonised complexity. Thus it would be mistaken
to represent Omega to ourselves simply as a centre born of the
fusion of elements which it collects, or annihilating them in
itself By its structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only
be a distinct Centre radiating at the core of a system of centres ; a
grouping in which personalisation of the All and personahsanons
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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL
of the elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and with-
out merging, under the influence of a supremely autonomous
focus of union. 1 That is the only picture which emerges when we
try to apply the notion of collectivity with remorseless logic to
a granular whole of thoughts.
And at this point we begin to see the motives for the fervour
and the impotence which accompany every egoistic solution of
life. Egoism, whether personal or racial, is quite rightly excited
by the idea of the element ascending through faithfulness to life,
to the extremes of the incommunicable and the exclusive that it
holds within it. It feels right. Its only mistake, but a fatal one,
is to confuse individuality with personality. In trying to separate
itself as much as possible from others, the element individualises
itself ; but in doing so it becomes retrograde and seeks to drag
the world backwards towards plurality and into matter. In fact
it diminishes itself and loses itself. To be fully ourselves it is in
the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all
the rest, that we must advance — towards the ' other '. The peak
of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality
but our person ; and according to the evolutionary structure of
the world, wc can only find our person by uniting together.
There is no mind without synthesis. The same law holds good
from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion
to ' egoism '. Like the Omega which attracts it, the element
only becomes personal when it universaliscs itself. 2
There is, however, an obvious and essential proviso to be
made. For the human particles to become really personalised
under the creative influence of union — according to the preceding
analysis — not every kind of union will do. Since it is a question of
achieving a synthesis of centres, it is centre to centre that they
1 It is for this central focus, necessarily autonomous, that we shall hence-
forward reserve the expression ' Omega Point '.
* Conversely, it only universalises itself properly in becoming super-per-
sonal. There is all the difference (and ambiguity) between the true and the
false political or religious mysticisms. By the latter man is destroyed ; by
the former he is fulfilled by ' becoming lost in the greater than himself'.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
must make contact and not otherwise. Thus, amongst the various
forms of psychic inter-activity animating the noosphcre, the
energies we must identify, harness and develop before all others
are those of an ' intercentric ' nature, if we want to give effective
help to the progress of evolution in ourselves.
Which brings us to the problem of love.
2.
LOVE AS ENERGY
We are accustomed to consider (and with what a refinement of
analysis!) only the sentimental face of love, the joy and miseries
it causes us. It is in its natural dynamism and its evolutionary
significance that I shall be dealing with it here, with a view to
determining the ultimate phases of the phenomenon of man.
Considered in its full biological reality, love— that is to say,
the affinity of being with being— is not peculiar to man. It is
a general property of all life and as such it embraces, in its varieties
and degrees, all the forms successively adopted by organised
matter. In the mammals, so close to ourselves, it is easily recog-
nised in its different modalities : sexual passion, parental instinct,
social solidarity, etc. Farther off, that is to say lower down on
the tree of life, analogies are more obscure until they become so
faint as to be imperceptible. But this is the place to repeat what
I said earlier when we were discussing the ' within of things .
If there were no real internal propensity to unite, even at a pro-
digiously rudimentary level— indeed in the molecule itself— it
would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up,
with us, in ' hominised ' form. By rights, to be certain of its
presence in ourselves, we should assume its presence, at least in
an inchoate form, in everything that is. And in fact if we look
around us at the confluent ascent of consciousnesses, we see it
is not lacking anywhere. Plato felt this and has immortalised
the idea in his Dialogues. Later, with thinkers like Nicolas of
Cusa, mediaeval philosphy returned technically to the same
notion. Driven by ths forces of love, the fragments of the world
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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL
seek each other so that the world may come to being. This is
no metaphor ; and it is much more than poetry. Whether as a
force or a curvature, the universal gravity of bodies, so striking
to us, is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves
nature. To perceive cosmic energy ' at the fount ' we must, if
there is a within of things, go down into the internal or radial
zone of spiritual attractions.
Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than
the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element
by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
This, if I am not mistaken is the ray of light which will help
us to see more clearly around us.
We are distressed and pained when we see modern attempts
at human collectivisation ending up, contrary to our expectations
and theoretical predictions, in a lowering and an enslavement of
consciousnesses. But so far how have wc gone about the business
of unification ? A material situation to be defended ; a new
industrial field to be opened up, better conditions for a social
class or less favoured nations — those arc the only and very
mediocre grounds on which we have so far tried to get together.
There is no cause to be surprised if, in the footsteps of animal
societies, we become mechanised in the very play of association.
Even in the supremely intellectual activity of science (at any rate as
long as it remains purely speculative and abstract) the impact
of our souls only operates obliquely and indirectly. Contact is
still superficial, involving the danger of yet another servitude.
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as
to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins
them by what is deepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily
experience. At what moment do lovers come into the most
complete possession of themselves if not when they say they
are lost in each other ? In truth, does not love every instant achieve
all around us, in the couple or the team, the magic feat, the feat
reputed to be contradictory, of ' personalising ' by totalising ?
And if that is what it can achieve daily on a small scale, why
should it not repeat this one day on world-wide dimensions ?
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals
and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the clement with
the whole, and of unity with multitude— all these are called
Utopian and yet they are biologically necessary. And for them
to be incarnated in the world all we may well need is to imagine
our power of loving developing until it embraces the total of
men and of the earth.
It may be said that this is the precise point at which we are
invoking the impossible. Man's capacity, it may seem, is con-
fined to giving his affection to one human being or to very few.
Beyond that radius the heart does not carry, and there is only
room for cold justice and cold reason. To love all and everyone
is a contradictory and false gesture which only leads in the end to
loving no-one.
To that I would answer that if, as you claim, a universal love
is impossible, how can we account for that irresistible instinct
in our hearts which leads us towards unity whenever and in
whatever direction our passions are stirred ? A sense of the uni-
verse, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when con-
fronted by nature, beauty, music— these seem to be an expectation
and awareness of a Great Presence. The ' mystics ' and their
commentators apart, how has psychology been able so con-
sistently to ignore this fundamental vibration whose ring can
be heard by every practised ear at die basis, or rather at the
summit, of every great emotion ? Resonance to the All— the
keynote of pure poetry and pure religion. Once again : what
does this phenomenon, which is bom with thought and grows
with it, reveal if not a deep accord between two realities which
seek each other ; the severed particle which trembles at the
approach of ' the rest ' ?
We are often inclined to think that we have exhausted the
various natural forms of love with a man's love for his wife,
his children, his friends and to a certain extent for his country.
Yet precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing
from this list, the one which, under the pressure of an involuting
universe, precipitates the elements one upon the other in the
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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL
Whole — cosmic affinity and hence cosmic sense. A universal
love is not only psychologically possible ; it is the only complete
and final way in which we are able to love.
But, with this point made, how are we to explain the
appearance all around us of mounting repulsion and hatred ?
If such a strong potentiality is besieging us from within and
urging us to union, what is it waiting for to pass from potentiality
to action ? Just this, no doubt : that we should overcome the
' anti-personalist ' complex which paralyses us, and make up our
minds to accept the possibility, indeed the reality, of some
source of love and object of love at the summit of the world above
our heads. So long as it absorbs or appears to absorb the person,
collectivity kills the love that is trying to come to birth. As
such collectivity is essentially unlovable. That is where philan-
thropic systems break down. Common sense is right. It is
impossible to give oneself to an anonymous number. But if the
universe ahead of us assumes a face and a heart, and so to speak
personifies itself, 1 then in the atmosphere created by this focus
the elemental attraction will immediately blossom. Then, no
doubt, under the heightened pressure of an infolding world, the
formidable energies of attraction, still dormant between human
molecules, will burst forth.
The discoveries of the last hundred years, with their unitary
perspectives, have brought a new and decisive impetus to our
sense of the world, to our sense of the earth, and to our human
sense. Hence the rise of modern pantheism. But this impetus
will only end by plunging us back into super-matter unless it
leads us towards someone.
For die failure that threatens us to be turned into success,
for the concurrence of human monads to come about, it is
necessary and sufficient for us that we should extend our science
to its farthest limits and recognise and accept (as being necessary
to close and balance space-time) not only some vague future
1 Nor, of course, by becoming a person, but by charging itself at the very
heart of its development with the dominating and unifying influence of a
focus of personal energies and attractions.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
existence, but also, as I must now stress, the radiation as a present
reality of that mysterious centre of our centres which I have
called Omega.
3. THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE
OMEGA POINT
After allowing itself to be captivated in excess by the charms of
analysis to the extent of falling into illusion, modern thought
is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative
value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there
is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the
cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual,
and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and
theorems. We are now inclined to admit that at each further
degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated
elements emerges in a new order. And with this admission,
consciousness, life and thought are on the threshold of acquiring
a right to existence in terms of science. But science is nevertheless
still far from recognising that this something has a particular value
of independence and solidity. For, bom of an incredible con-
course of chances on a precariously assembled edifice, and failing
to create any measurable increase of energy by their advent, are
not these ' creatures of synthesis ', from the experimental point
of view, the most beautiful as well as the most fragile of things ?
How could they anticipate or survive the ephemeral union of
particles on which their souls have alighted ? So in the end, in
spite of a half-hearted conversion to spiritual views, it is still on
the elementary side— that is, towards matter infinitely diluted
—that physics and biology look to find the eternal and the Great
Stability.
In conformity with this state of mind the idea that some
Soul of souls should be developing at the summit of the world
is not as strange as might be thought from the present-day views
of human reason. After all, is there any other way in which our
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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL
thought can generalise the Principle of Emergence ? 1 At the
same time, as this Soul coincides with a supremely improbable
coincidence of the totality of elements and causes, it remains
understood or implied that it could not form itself save at an
extremely distant future and in a total dependence on the rever-
sible laws of energy.
Yet it is precisely from these two restrictions (fragility and
distance), both incompatible to my mind with the nature and
function of Omega, that we want to rid ourselves — and this for
two positive reasons, one of love, the other of survival.
First of all the reason of Love. Expressed in terms of internal
energy, the cosmic function of Omega consists in initiating and
maintaining within its radius the unanimity of the world's
' reflective ' particles. But how could it exercise this action
were it not in some sort loving and lovable at this very moment ?
Love, I said, dies in contact with the impersonal and the
anonymous. With equal infallibility it becomes impoverished
with remoteness in space — and still more, much more, with
difference in time. For love to be possible there must be co-
existence. Accordingly, however marvellous its foreseen figure,
Omega could never even so much as equilibrate the play of
human attractions and repulsions if it did not act with equal
force, that is to say with the same stuff of proximity. With
love, as with every other sort of energy, it is within the existing
datum that the lines of force must at every instant come together.
Neither an ideal centre, nor a potential centre could possibly
suffice. A present and real noosphere goes with a real and
present centre. To be supremely attractive, Omega must be
supremely present.
In addition, the reason of survival. To ward off the threat of
disappearance, incompatible with the mechanism of reflective
activity, man tries to bring together in an ever vaster and more
permanent subject the collective principle of his acquisitions —
civilisation, humanity, the spirit of the earth. Associated in these
enormous entities, with their incredibly slow rhythm of evolu-
1 See, the quotation 60m J. B. S. Haldane in footnote p. 57.
269
THE PHENOMENON OP MAN
tion, he has the impression of having escaped from the destructive
action of time. 1
But by doing this he has only pushed back the problem. For
after all, however large the radius traced witliin time and space,
does the circle ever embrace anything but the perishable ? So
long as our constructions rest with all their weight on the earth,
they will vanish with the earth. The radical defect in all forms
of belief in progress, as they are expressed in positivist credos,
is that they do not definitely eliminate death. What is the use of
detecting a focus of any sort in the van of evolution if that
focus can and must one day disintegrate ? To satisfy the ultimate
requirements of our action, Omega must be independent of the
collapse of the forces with which evolution is woven.
Actuality, irreversibility. There is only one way in which
our minds can integrate into a coherent picture of noogenesis
these two essential properties of the autonomous centre of all
centres, and that is to resume and complement our Principle of
Emergence. In the light of our experience it is abundantly
clear that emergence in the course of evolution can only happen
successively and with mechanical dependence on what precedes
it. First the grouping of the elements ; then the manifestation
of ' soul ' whose operation only betrays, from the point of view
of energy, a more and more complex and sublimated involution
of the powers transmitted by the chains of elements. The radial
function of the tangential : a pyramid whose apex is supported
from below : that is what we see during the course of the pro-
cess. And it is in the very same way that Omega itself is discovered
to us at the end of the whole processus, inasmuch as in it the
movement of synthesis culminates. Yet we must be careful to
note that under this evolutive facet Omega still only reveals
half of itself. While being the last term of its series, it is also
outside all series. Not only does it crown, but it closes. Otherwise
the sum would fall short of itself, in organic contradiction with
the whole operation. When, going beyond the elements, we
1 See for example that curious book by Wells, The Anatomy oj Frustration,
which eloquently bears witness to the faith and the misgivings ot modem man.
27O
BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL
come to speak of the conscious Pole of the world, it is not
enough to say that it emerges from the rise of consciousnesses:
we must add that from this genesis it has already emerged ;
without which it could neither subjugate into love nor fix in
incorruptibility. If by its very nature it did not escape from the
time and space which it gathers together, it would not be Omega.
Autonomy, actuality, irreversibility, and thus finally tran-
scendence are the four attributes of Omega. In this way we
round off without difficulty the scheme left incomplete at the
end of our second chapter, where we sought to enclose the
energy-complex of our universe.
In Omega we have in the first place the principle we needed
to explain both the persistent march of dungs towards greater
consciousness, and the paradoxical solidity of what is most
fragile. Contrary to the appearances still admitted by physics,
the Great Stability is not at the bottom in the infra-elementary
sphere, but at the top in the ultra-synthetic sphere. It is thus
entirely by its tangential envelope that the world goes on dissi-
pating itself in a chance way into matter. By its radial nucleus
it finds its shape and its natural consistency in gravitating against
the tide of probability towards a divine focus of mind which
draws it onward.
Thus something in the cosmos escapes from entropy, and
does so more and more.
During immense periods in the course of evolution, the radial,
obscurely stirred up by the action of the Prime Mover ahead,
was only able to express itself, in diffuse aggregates, in animal
consciousness. And at that stage, not being able, above them,
to attach themselves to a support whose order of simplicity was
greater than their own, the nuclei were hardly formed before
they began to disaggregate. But as soon as, through reflection,
a type of unity appeared no longer closed or even centred, but
punctiform, the sublime physics of centres came into play. When
they became centres, and therefore persons, the elements could
at last begin to react, direcdy as such, to the personalising action
of the centre of centres. When consciousness broke through the
271
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
critical surface of hominisation, it really passed from divergence
to convergence and changed, so to speak, both hemisphere and
pole. Below that critical ' equator ' lay the relapse into
multiplicity ; above it, the plunge into growing and irreversible
unification. Once formed, a reflective centre can no longer
change except by involution upon itself. To outward appearance,
admittedly, man disintegrated just like any animal. But here and
there we find an inverse function of the phenomenon. By death,
in the animal, the radial is reabsorbed into the tangential, while
in man it escapes and is liberated from it. It escapes from entropy
by turning back to Omega : the hominisation of death itself.
Thus from the grains of thought forming the veritable and
indestructable atoms of its stuff, the universe— a well-defined
universe in the outcome— goes on building itself above our
heads in the inverse direction of matter which vanishes. The
universe is a collector and conservator, not of mechanical energy,
as we supposed, but of persons. All round us, one by one, like
a continual exhalation, ' souls ' break away, carrying upwards
their incommunicable load of consciousness. One by one, yet
not in isolation. Since, for each of them, by the very nature of
Omega, there can only be one possible point of definitive
emersion — that point at which, under the synthesising action of
personalising union, the noosphere (furling its elements upon
themselves as it too furls upon itself) will reach collectively its
point of convergence — at the ' end of the world '.
272
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