object:4.03 - THE ULTIMATE 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 ULTIMATE EARTH
We have seen that without the involution of matter upon itself,
that is to say, without the closed chemistry of molecules, cells
and phyletic branches, there would never have been either
biosphere or noosphere. In their advent and their development,
life and thought are not only accidentally, but also structurally,
bound up with the contours and destiny of the terrestrial mass.
But, on the other hand, we now see ahead of us a psychical
centre of universal drift, transcending time and space and thus
essentially extra-planetary, to sustain and equilibrate the surge
of consciousnesses.
The idea is that of noogenesis ascending irreversibly towards
Omega through the strictly limited cycle of a gcogenesis. At a
given moment in the future, under some influence exerted by
one or the other of these curves or of both together, it is inevitable
that the two branches should separate. However convergent it
be, evolution cannot attain to fulfilment on earth except through
a point of dissociation.
With this we are introduced to a fantastic and inevitable
event which now begins to take shape in our perspective, the
event which comes nearer with every day that passes : the end
of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate
phase of the phenomenon of man.
No one would dare to picture to himself what the noosphere
will be like in its final guise, no one, that is, who has glimpsed
however faindy the incredible potential of unexpectedness
accumulated in the spirit of the earth. The end of the world
defies imagination. But if it would be absurd to try to describe
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it, we may none the less— by making use of the lines of approach
already laid down— to some extent foresee the significance and
circumscribe the forms.
What the ultimate earth cannot be in a universe of conscious
substance; how will it take shape; and what it will probably be
—those are the questions I want to raise, coldly and logically, in
no way apocalyptically, not so much for the sake of affirming
anything as to give food for thought.
i.
PROGNOSTICS TO BE SET ASIDE
When the end of the world is mentioned, the idea that leaps into
our minds is always one of catastrophe.
Generally we think of a sidereal cataclysm. There arc so
many stars hurtling around and brushing past ; there are those
exploding worlds on the horizon ; so, surely, by the implacable
laws of chance, our turn will come sooner or later and we shall
be stricken and killed ; or, at the least, wc shall have to face a
slow death in our prison.
Since physics has discovered that all energy runs down, we
seem to feel the world getting a shade chillier every day. That
cooling-off to which we were condemned Iras been partially
compensated for by another discovery, that of radio-activity,
which has happily intervened to compensate and delay the
imminent cooling. The astronomers are now in a position to
guarantee that, if all goes as it should, we have at any rate several
hundred million years ahead of us. So we can breathe again.
Yet, though the settlement is postponed, the shadow grows
longer.
And will mankind still be there to watch the evening fall ?
In the interim, apart from the cosmic mishaps that lie in wait for
us, what will happen in the living layer of the earth ? With
age and increasing complication, wc arc ever more threatened
by internal dangers at the core of both the biosphere and the
noospherc. Onslaughts of microbes, organic counter-evolutions,
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THE ULTIMATE EARTH
sterility, war, revolution — there are so many ways of coming
to an end. Yet perhaps anything would be better than a long-
drawn-out senility.
We are well aware of these different eventualities. We have
turned them over in our minds. We have read descriptions of
them in the novels of the Goncourts, Benson and Wells, or in
scientific works signed by famous names. Each one of them is
perfectly feasible. Wc could very well, and at any moment, be
crushed by a gigantic comet. And, equally true, tomorrow the
earth might quake and collapse under our feet. Taken individu-
ally, each human will can repudiate the task of ascending higher
towards union. And yet, on the strength of all we learn from
past evolution, I feel entitled to say that we have nothing what-
ever to fear from these manifold disasters in so far as they imply
the idea of premature accident or failure. However possible
they may be in theory, wc have higher reasons for being sure
that they will not happen.
All pessimistic representations of the earth's last days —
whether in terms of cosmic catastrophe, biological disruptions
or simply arrested growth or senility — have this in common :
that they take the characteristics and conditions of our individual
and elemental ends and extend them without correction to life as
a whole. Accident, disease and decrepitude spell the death of
men ; and therefore the same applies to mankind.
But have we any right to generalise in this simple way ?
When an individual disappears, even prematurely, another is
always there to replace him. His loss is not irreparable from the
point of view of the continuation of life. But what about man-
kind ? In one of his books the great palaeontologist Matthew
has suggested that if the human branch disappeared, another
thinking branch would soon take its place. But he does not tell us
where this mysterious shoot could be expected to appear on the
tree of life as we know it, and doubdess he would be hard
put to it to do so.
If wc take the whole of history into consideration, the bio-
logical situation seems to me to be quite otherwise.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
Once and once only in the course of its planetary existence
has the earth been able to envelop itself with life. Similarly
once and once only has life succeeded in crossing the threshold
of reflection. For thought as for life there has been just one season.
And we must not forget that since the birth of thought man has
been the leading shoot of the tree of life. That being so, the hopes
for the future of the noosphere (that is to say, of biogenesis,
which in the end is the same as cosmogenesis) are concentrated
exclusively upon him as such. How then could he come to an
end before his time, or stop, or deteriorate, unless the universe
committed abortion upon itself, which we have already decided
to be absurd ?
In its present state, the world would be unintelligible and the
presence in it of reflection would be incomprehensible, unless
we supposed there to be a secret complicity between the infinite
and the infinitesimal to warm, nourish and sustain to the very
end — by dint of chance, contingencies and the exercise of free
choice — the consciousness that has emerged between the two.
It is upon this complicity that we must depend. Man is irreplace-
able. Therefore, however improbable it might seem, he must
reach the goal, not necessarily, doubtless, but infallibly.
What we should expect is not a halt in any shape or form,
but an ultimate progress coming at its biologically appointed
hour ; a maturation and a paroxysm leading ever higher into
the Improbable from which we have sprung. It is in this direc-
tion that we must extrapolate man and hominisation if we
want to get a forward glimpse of the end of the world.
2. THE APPROACHES
Widiout going beyond the limits of scientific probability, we
can say diat life still has before it long periods of geological
time in which to develop. Moreover, in its thinking form, it
still shows every sign of an energy in full expansion. On the
one hand, compared with the zoological layers which preceded
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it whose average duration is at least in the order of eighty million
years, mankind is so young that it could almost be called new-
born. On the other hand, to judge from the rapid developments
of thought in the short period of a few dozen centuries, this
youth bears within it the indications and the promises of an
entirely new biological cycle. Thus in all probability, between
our modern earth and the ultimate earth, there stretches an
immense period, characterised not by a slowing-down but a
speeding up and by the definitive florescence of the forces of
evolution along the line of the human shoot.
Assuming success — which is the only acceptable assumption
— under what form and along what lines can we imagine progress
developing during this period ?
In the first place, in a collective and spiritual form. We have
noticed that, since man's advent, there has been a certain slowing
down of the passive and somatic transformations of the organism
in favour of the conscious and active metamorphoses of the
individual absorbed in society. We find the artificial carrying
on the work of the natural ; and the transmission of an oral or
written culture being superimposed on genetic forms of heredity
(chromosomes). Without denying the possibility or even prob-
ability of a certain prolongation in our limbs, and still more in
our nervous system, of the orthogenetic processes of the past, 1
I am inclined to think that their influence, hardly appreciable
since the emergence of Homo sapiens, is destined to dwindle still
further. As thought regulated by a sort of quantum law, the
energies of life seem unable to spread in one region or take on
a new form except at the expense of a lowering elsewhere.
Since man's arrival, the evolutionary pressure seems to have
dropped in all the non-human branches of the tree of life. And
now that man has become an adult and has opened up for
himself the field of mental and social transformations, bodies
no longer change appreciably ; they no longer need to in the
1 Taken, up again and prolonged reflectively, artificially — who knows? —
by biology (assault on the laws and springs of heredity, use of hormones, etc.,
sec pp. 249-50).
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human branch ; or if they still change, it will only be under
our industrious control. It may well be that in its individual
capacities and penetration our brain has reached its organic
limits. But die movement does not stop there. From west to
east, evolution is henceforth occupied elsewhere, in a richer and
more complex domain, constructing, with all minds joined
together, wind. Beyond all nations and races, the inevitable
taking-as-a-whole of mankind has already begun.
With that said, we have now to ask : along what lines of
advance, among others— judging from the present condition of
the noosphere — are we destined to proceed from the planetary
level of psychic totalisation and evolutionary upsurge we are
now approaching ?
I can distinguish three principal ones in which we see again
the predictions to which we were already led by our analysis
of the ideas of science and humanity. They are : the organisation
of research, the concentration of research upon the subject of
man, and the conjunction of science and religion. These are
three natural terms of one and the same progression.
A. The Organisation of Research
We are given to boasting of our age being an age of science. And
if we arc thinking merely of the dawn compared to the darkness
that went before, up to a point we are justified. Something
enormous has been born in the universe with our discoveries
and our methods of research. Something has been started which,
I am convinced, will now never stop. Yet though we may
exalt research and derive enormous benefit from it, with what
pettiness of spirit, poverty of means and general haphazardness
do we pursue truth in the world today ! Have we ever given
serious thought to the predicament we are in ?
Like art — indeed we might almost say like thought itself—
science was bom with every sign of superfluity and fantasy. It
was born of the exuberance of an internal activity that had
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outstripped the material needs of life ; it was born of the
curiosity of dreamers and idlers. Gradually it became im-
portant ; its effectiveness gave it the freedom of the city. Living
in a world which it can justly be said to have revolutionised,
it has acquired a social status ; sometimes it is even worshipped.
Yet we still leave it to grow as best it can, hardly tending it,
like those wild plants whose fruits arc plucked by primitive
peoples in their forests. Everything is subordinated to the
increase in industrial production, and to armaments. The
scientist and the laboratories which multiply our powers still
receive nothing, or next to nothing. We behave as though we
expected discoveries to fall ready-made from the sky, like rain
or sunshine, while men concentrate on the serious business of
killing each other and eating. Let us stop to think for a moment
of the proportion of human energy devoted, here and now, to
the pursuit of truth. Or, in still more concrete terms, let us
glance at the percentage of a nations' revenue allotted in its budget
for the investigation of clearly-defmcd problems whose solution
would be of vital consequence for the world. If we did we
should be staggered. Less is provided annually for all the pure
research all over the world than for one capital ship. Surely
our great-grandsons will not be wrong if they think of us as
barbarians ?
The truth is that, as children of a transition period, we are
neither fully conscious of, nor in full control of, the new powers
that have been unleashed. Clinging to outworn habit, we still
see in science only a new means of providing more easily the
same old things. We put Pegasus between the traces. And
Pegasus languishes — unless he bolts with the waggon ! But the
moment will come — it is bound to — when man will be forced by
disparity of the equipage to admit that science is not an accessory
occupation for him but an essential activity, a natural derivative
of the overspill of energy constantly liberated by mechanisation.
We can envisage a world whose constantly increasing
' leisure ' and heightened interest would find their vital issue in
fathoming everything, trying everything, extending everything ;
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
a world in which giant telescopes and atom smashers would
absorb more money and excite more spontaneous admiration
than all the bombs and cannons put together; a world in which,
not only for the restricted band of paid research-workers, but
also for the man in the street, the day's ideal would be the
wresting of another secret or another force from corpuscles,
stars, or organised matter ; a world in which, as happens already,
one gives one's life to be and to know, rather than to possess.
That, on an estimate of the forces engaged, 1 is what is being
relentlessly prepared around us.
In some of the lower organisms the retina is, as it were, spread
over the whole surface of the body. In somewhat the same
way human vision is still diffuse in its operation, mixed up with
industrial activity and war. Biologically it needs to individualise
itself independendy, with its own distinct organs. It will not be
long now before the noosphere finds its eyes.
B. The Discovery of the Human Object
When mankind has once realised that its first function is to
penetrate, intellectually unify, and harness the energies which
surround it, in order still further to understand and master them,
there will no longer be any danger of running into an upper
limit of its florescence. A commercial market can reach satura-
tion point. One day, though substitutes may be found, we shall
have exhausted our mines and oil-wells. But to all appearances
nothing on earth will ever saturate our desire for knowledge or
exhaust our power for invention. For of each may be said :
crescit eundo.
That does not mean that science should propagate itself
indifFercntly in any and every direction at the same time like a
ripple in an isotropic medium. The more one looks, the more
1 External forces of planetary compression obliging humanity to totalise
itself organically in itself; and internal forces (ascendent and propulsive) of
spiritualisation, unleashed or exalted by technico-social totalisation.
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one sees. And the more one sees, the better one knows where
to look. If life has been able to advance, it is because, by cease-
less groping, it has successively found the points of least resist-
ance at which reality yielded to its thrust. Similarly, if research
is to progress tomorrow, it will be largely by localising the
central zones, the sensitive zones which are ' alive ', whose
conquest will afford us an easy mastery of all the rest.
From this point of view, if we are going towards a human
era of science, it will be eminently an era of human science.
Man, the knowing subject, will perceive at last that man, ' the
object of knowledge ', is the key to the whole science of nature.
Carrel referred to man as ' the unknown '. But man, we
should add, is the solution of everything that we can know.
Up to the present, whether from prejudice or fear, science
has been reluctant to look man in the face but has constantly
circled round the human object without daring to tackle it.
Materially our bodies seem insignificant, accidental, transitory
and fragile ; why bother about them ? Psychologically, our
souls are incredibly subdc and complex : how can one fit them
into a world of laws and formulas?
Yet the more persistently we try to avoid man in our theories,
the more tightly drawn become the circles wc describe around
him, as though we were caught up in his vortex. As I said in
my Preface, at the end of its analyses, physics is no longer sure
whether what is left in its hands is pure energy or, on the con-
trary, thought. At the end of its constructions, biology, if it
takes its discoveries to their logical conclusion, finds itself forced
to acknowledge the assemblage of thinking beings as die present
terminal form of evolution. We find man at the bottom, man
at the top, and, above all, man at the centre — man who lives
and struggles desperately in us and around us. We shall have to
come to grips with him sooner or later.
Man is, if 1 have not gone astray in these pages, an object
of study of unique value to science for two reasons, (i) He
represents, individually and socially, the most synthesised state
under which the stuff of the universe is available to us. (ii)
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Correctively, he is at present the most mobile point of the stuff
in course of transformation.
For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try
to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go
on making itself. The science of man is the practical and theoreti-
cal science of hominisation. It means profound study of the past
and of origins. But still more, it means constructive experiment
pursued on a continually renewed object. The programme is
immense and its only end or aim is that of the future.
What is involved, firstly, is the care and improvement of
the human body, the health and strength of the organism. So
long as its phase of immersion in the ' tangential ' lasts, thought
can only be built up on this material basis. And now, in the
tumult of ideas that accompany the awakening of the mind,
are we not undergoing physical degeneration ? It has been said
that we might well blush comparing our own mankind, so full
of misshapen subjects, with those animal societies in which, in a
hundred thousand individuals, not one will be found lacking in
a single antenna. In itself that geometrical perfection is not in
the line of our evolution whose bent is towards suppleness and
freedom. All the same, suitably subordinated to other values,
it may well appear as an indication and a lesson. So far we
have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we
have given too little thought to the question of what medical
and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection
should we suppress them. In the course of the coming centuries
it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a
standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and
developed.
Eugenics applied to individuals leads to eugenics applied to
society. It would be more convenient, and we would incline
to think it safe, to leave the contours of that great body made
of all our bodies to take shape on their own, influenced only by
the automatic play of individual urges and whims. ' Better not
interfere with the forces of the world ! ' Once more we are
up against the mirage o( instinct, the so-called infallibility of
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THE ULTIMATE EARTH
nature. But is it not precisely the world itself which, culminat-
ing in thought, expects us to think out again the instinctive
impulses of nature so as to perfect them ? Reflective substance
requires reflective treatment. If there is a future for mankind,
it can only be imagined in terms of a harmonious conciliation
of what is free with what is planned and totalised. Points
involved are : the distribution of the resources of the globe ;
the control of the trek towards unpopulated areas ; the optimum
use of the powers set free by mechanisation ; the physiology of
nations and races; geo-economy, geo-politics, geo-demography;
the organisation of research developing into a reasoned organ-
isation of the earth. Whether we like it or not, all the signs and
all our needs converge in the same direction. We need and are
irresistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all
physics, all biology and all psychology, a science of human energetics.
It is in the course of that creation, already obscurely begun,
that science, by being led to concentrate on man, will find itself
increasingly face to face with religion.
c.
The Conjunction oj Science and Religion
To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an
anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and
reason supplanting belief. Our generation and the two that
preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between
science and faith ; indeed it seemed at one moment a foregone
conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of
the latter.
But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to
need to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of
equilibrium — not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis.
After close on two centuries of passionate struggles, neither
science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary. On
the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop
normally without the other. And the reason is simple : the
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same life animates both. Neither in its impetus nor its achieve-
ments can science go to its limits without becoming tinged with
mysticism and charged with faith,
Firstly in its impetus. We touched on this point when dealing
with the problem of action. Man will only continue to work
and to research so long as he is prompted by a passionate interest.
Now this interest is entirely dependent on the conviction, strictly
undemonstrable to science, that the universe has a direction
and that it could— indeed, if we are faithful, it should— result
in some sort of irreversible perfection. Hence comes belief in
progress.
Secondly in its construction. Scientifically we can envisage an
almost indefinite improvement in the human organism and
human society. But as soon as we try to put our dreams into
practice, we realise that the problem remains indeterminate or
even insoluble unless, with some partially super-rational intuition,
we admit the convergent properties of the world we belong to.
Hence belief in unity.
Furthermore, if we decide, under the pressure of facts, in
favour of an optimism of unification, we run into the technical
necessity of discovering — in addition to the impetus required to
push us forward and in addition to the particular objective which
should determine our route — the special binder or cement which
will associate our lives together, vitally, without diminishing or
distorting them. Hence, belief in a supremely attractive centre
which has personality.
In short, as soon as science outgrows the analytic investiga-
tions which constitute its lower and preliminary stages, and
passes on to synthesis — synthesis which naturally culminates in
the realisation of some superior state of humanity — it is at once
led to foresee and place its stakes on the future and on the all.
And with that it out-distances itself and emerges in terms of
option and adoration.
Thus Renan and the nineteenth century were not wrong to
speak of a Religion of Science. Their mistake was not to see
that their cult of humanity implied the re-integration, in a re-
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THE ULTIMATE EARTH
newed form, of those very spiritual forces they claimed to be
getting rid of.
When, in the universe in movement to which we have just
awakened, we look at the temporal and spatial series diverging
and amplifying themselves around and behind us like the laminae
of a cone, we are perhaps engaging in pure science. But when
we turn towards the summit, towards the totality and the future,
we cannot help engaging in religion.
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases
of one and the same complete act of knowledge — the only one
which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to
contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
In the mutual reinforcement of these two still opposed
powers, in the conjunction of reason and mysticism, the human
spirit is destined, by the very nature of its development, to find
the uttermost degree of its penetration with the maximum of
its vital force.
3. THE ULTIMATE
Always pushing forward in the three directions we have just
indicated, and taking advantage of the immense duration it has
still to live, mankind has enormous possibilities before it.
Until the coming of man, life was quickly arrested and
hemmed in by the specialisations into which it was forced to
mould itself so as to act, and became fixed, then dispersed, at
each forward bound. Since the threshold of reflection, wc have
entered into an entirely new field of evolution — thanks to the
astonishing properties of 'artifice' which separate the instrument
from the organ and enable one and the same creature to intensify
and vary the modalities of its action indefinitely without losing
anything of its freedom ; and thanks to the prodigious power
of thought to bring together and combine in a single conscious
effort all the human particles. In fact, though the study of the
past may give us some idea of the resources of organised matter
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
in its dispersed state, we have as yet no idea of the possible magnitude
of 'noospheric' effects. We are confronted with human
vibrations resounding by the million-a whole layer of con-
sciousness exerting simultaneous pressure upon the future and
the collected and hoarded produce of a million years of thought.
Have we ever tried to form an idea of what such magnitudes
represent P 1
In this direction, the most unexpected is perhaps what we
should most expect. Under the increasing tension of the mind
on the surface of the globe, we may begin by asking serious y
whether life will not perhaps one day succeed in ingeniously
forcing the bars of its earthly prison, either by finding the means
to invade other inhabited planets or (a still more giddy per-
spective) by getting into psychical touch with other focal points
of consciousness across the abysses of space. The meeting and
mutual fecundation of two noosphcres is a supposition which may
seem at fust sight crazy, but which after all is merely extending
to psychical phenomena a scope no-one would think of denying
to material phenomena. Consciousness would thus finally con-
struct itself by a synthesis of planetary units. Why not, in a
universe whose astral unit is the galaxy ?
Without in any way wishing to discourage such hypotheses
—whose realisation, though enormously enlarging the dimen-
sions, would leave unchanged both the convergent form and
hence the final duration of noogenesis— I consider their prob-
ability too remote for them to be worth dwelling on.
The human organism is so extraordinarily complicated and
1 Over and above the intellectual value of isolated human units, there are
thus grounds for recognising a collective exaltation (by mutual support or
reverberation) when those units are suitably arranged. It would be difficult
to say whether there are any Aristotles, Platos or St. Augustines now on earth
(how could it be proved : on the other hand why not?) But what is clear is
that, each supporting the other (making a single arch or a single mirror), our
modern souls sec and feel today a world such as (in size, inter-connections and
potentialities) escaped all the great men of antiquity. To this progress in
consciousness, could anyone dare to object that there has been no corresponding
advance in the profound structure of being?
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THE ULTIMATE EARTH
sensitive, and so closely adapted to terrestrial conditions, that it
is difficult to see how man could acclimatise himself to another
planet, even if he were capable of navigating through inter-
planetary space. The sidereal durations are so immense that it is
difficult to see how in two different regions of the heavens, two
thought systems could co-exist and coincide at comparable stages
of their development. For these two reasons among others I
adopt the supposition that our noosphere is destined to close
in upon itself in isolation, and that it is in a psychical rather than
a spatial direction that it will find an outlet, without need to
leave or overflow the earth. Hence, quite naturally, the notion
of change of state recurs.
Noogenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly.
We have pointed to the principal characteristics of that move-
ment : the closer association of the grains of thought ; the
synthesis of individuals and of nations or races ; the need of an
autonomous and supreme personal focus to bind elementary
personalities together, without deforming them, in an atmosphere
of active sympathy. And, once again : all this results from the
combined action of two curvatures — the roundness of the earth
and the cosmic convergence of mind — in conformity with the
law of complexity and consciousness.
Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated,
this essentially convergent movement will attain such intens-
ity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be
obliged — as happened to the individual forces of instinct — to
reflect upon itself at a single point j 1 that is to say, in this case,
to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre
on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration.
This will be the end and the fulfilment of the spirit of the earth.
The end of the world : the wholesale internal introversion
upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached
the uttermost limit of its complexity and its ccntrality.
The end of the world : the overthrow of equilibrium,
1 Which amounts to saying that human history develops between two points
of reflection, the one inferior and individual, the other superior and collective.
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THE PHENOMENON OP MAN
detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix,
so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega.
The end of the world : critical point simultaneously of
emergence and emersion, of maturation and escape.
We can entertain two almost contradictory suppositions about
the physical and psychical state our planet will be in as it
approaches maturation. 1 According to the first hypothesis which
expresses the hopes towards which we ought in any case to turn
our efforts as to an ideal, evil on the earth at its final stage will
be reduced to a minimum. Disease and hunger will be conquered
by science and we will no longer need to fear them in any acute
form. And, conquered by the sense of the earth and human
sense, hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in
the ever-warmer radiance of Omega. Some sort of unanimity
will reign over the entire mass of the noosphere. The final con-
vergence will take place in peace. 2 Such an outcome would of
course conform most harmoniously with our theory.
But there is another possibility. Obeying a law from which
nothing in the past has ever been exempt, evil may go on grow-
ing alongside good, and it too may attain its paroxysm at the
end in some specifically new form.
There are no summits without abysses.
Enormous powers will be liberated in mankind by the inner
play of its cohesion : though it may be that this energy will
still be employed discordandy tomorrow, as today and in the
past. Are we to foresee a mechanising synergy under brute
force, or a synergy of sympathy ? Are we to foresee man seeking
to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a
greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? A
conflict may supervene. In that case the noosphere, in the course
of and by virtue of the process which draws it together, will,
1 On the degree of ' inevitability ' of this maturation of a free mass, see
Conclusion, p. 309.
8 Though at the same time— since a critical point is being approached— in
extreme tension. There is nothing in common between this perspective and the
old millenary dreams of a terrestrial paradise at the end of time.
288
THE ULTIMATE EARTH
when it has reached its point of unification, split into two zones
each attracted to an opposite pole of adoration. Thought has
never completely united upon itself here below. Universal love
would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere
so as to consummate it — the part which decided to ' cross the
threshold ', to get outside itself into the other. Ramification once
again, for the last time.
In this second hypothesis, which is more in conformity with
traditional apocalyptic thinking, we may perhaps discern three
curves around us rising up at one and the same time into the
future : an inevitable education in die organic possibilities of
the earth, an internal schism of consciousness ever increasingly
divided on two opposite ideals of evolution, and positive attrac-
tion of the centre of centres at the heart of those who turn
towards it. And die earth would finish at the triple point at
which, by a coincidence altogether in keeping with the ways
of life, these three curves would meet and attain their maximum
at the very same moment.
The death of the materially exhausted planet ; the split of
the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity ; and
simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and
with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe
which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in labori-
ously synthesising itself to the very end.
Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contra-
dicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy
transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible
universe.
Ecstasy in concord ; or discord ; but in either case by excess
of interior tension : the only biological outcome proper to or
conceivable for the phenomenon of man.
Among those who have attempted to read this book to the
end, many will close it, dissatisfied and thoughtful, wondering
whether I have been leading them through facts, through meta-
physics or through dreams.
289
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
But have those who still hesitate in this way really under-
stood the rigorous and salutary conditions imposed on our
reason by the coherence of the universe, now admitted by all ?
A mark appearing on a film; an electroscope discharging abnor-
mally ; that is enough to force physics to accept fantastic powers
in the 'atom. Similarly, if we try to bring man, body and soul,
within the framework of what is experimental, man obliges us
to readjust completely to his measure the layers of time and space.
To make room for thought in the world, I have needed to
' interiorise ' matter : to imagine an energetics of the mind ; to
conceive a noogenesis rising upstream against the flow of
entropy ; to provide evolution with a direction, a line of advance
and critical points ; and finally to make all things double back
upon someone.
In this arrangement of values I may have gone astray at many
points. It is up to others to try to do better. My one hope is
that I have made the reader feel both the reality, difficulty, and
urgency of the problem and, at the same time, the scale and the
form which the solution cannot escape.
The only universe capable of containing the human person
is an irreversibly ' personalising ' universe.
290
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