"Noogenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly. We have pointed to the
principle characteristics of that movement : 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 intensity 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 (Which amounts to saying that human history develops between two points of
reflection, the one inferior and individual, the other superior and collective); 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 fulfillment
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 centrality.
The end of the world : the overthrow of equilibrium, 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. 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 reduces 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 convergence will take
place in peace. (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.) 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 growing 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 discordantly 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, 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 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 the organic possibilities of the earth, an internal schism of
consciousness ever increasingly divided on two opposite ideals of evolution, and positive
attraction of the centre of centres at the heart of those who turn towards it. And the 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 laboriously synthesising itself to the
very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the
convergent nature of noogensis, 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."
"In every epoch man has thought himself at a 'turning point of history'. And to a certain
extent, as he is advancing on a rising spiral, he has not been wrong. But there are moments
when this impression of transformation becomes accentuated and is thus particularly
justified. And we are certainly not exaggerating the importance of our contemporary
existences in estimating that, upon them, a turn of profound importance is taking place in
the world which may even crush them.
When did this turn begin? It is naturally impossible to say exactly. Life a great ship, the
human mass only changes its course gradually, so much so that we can put far back- at
least as far as the Renaissance- the first vibrations which indicate the change of route. It is
clear, at any rate, that at the end of the eighteenth century the course had been changed in
the West. Since then, in spite of our occasional obstinacy in pretending that we are the
same, we have in fact entered a different world.
Firstly, economic changes. Advanced as it was in many ways two centuries ago, our
civilisation was still based fundamentally on the soil and its partition. The type of 'real'
property, the nucleus of the family, the prototype of the state (and even the universe) was
still, as in the earliest days of society, the arable field, the territorial basis. Then, little by
little, as a result of the 'dynamisation' of money, property has evaporated into something
fluid and impersonal, so mobile that already the wealth of nations themselves has almost
nothing in common with their frontiers. Secondly, industrial changes. Up to the eighteenth
century, in spite of the many improvements made, there was still only one known source of
chemical energy- fire. And there was only one sort of mechanical energy employed-
muscle, human or animal, multiplied by the machine. Lastly social changes and the
awakening of the masses.
Merely from looking at these external signs we can hardly fail to suspect that the great
unrest which has pervaded our life in the West ever since the storm of the French
Revolution springs from a nobler and deeper cause than the difficulties of a world seeking
to recover some ancient equilibrium that it has lost. There is no question of shipwreck.
What we are up against is the heavy swell of an unknown sea which we are just entering
from behind the cape that protected us. What is troubling us intellectually, politically and
even spiritually is something quite simple. With his customary acute intuition, Henri Breuil
said to me one day; 'We have only just cast off the last moorings which held us to the
Neolithic age.' The formula is paradoxical but illuminating. In fact the more I have thought
over these words, the more inclined I have been to think that Breuil was right.
We are, at this very moment, passing through a change of age. The age of industry; the age
of oil, electricity and the atom; the age of the machine, of huge collectivities and of science-
the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era we are entering. The word
matters little. What does matter is that we should be told that, at the cost of what we are
enduring, life is taking a step, and a decisive step, in us and in our environment. After the
long maturation that has been steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the
agricultural centuries, the hour has come at last, characterised by the birth pangs inevitable
in another change of state. There were the first men- those who witnessed our origin.
There are others who will witness the great scenes of the end. To us in our brief span of
life, falls the honour and good fortune of coinciding with a critical change of the noosphere.
In these confused and restless zones in which present blends with future in a world of
upheaval, we stand face to face with all the grandeur, the unprecedented grandeur, of the
phenomenon of man. Here if anywhere, now if ever, have we, more legitimately than any
of our predecessors, the right to think that we can measure the importance and detect the
direction of the process of hominisation. Let us look carefully and try to understand. And
to do so let us prove beneath the surface and try to decipher the particular form of mind
which is coming to birth in the womb of the earth today.
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with
a hundred new radiations- this great organism lives, in final analysis, only because of, and
for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath a change of age lies a change of thought. Where are
we to look for it, where are we to situate this renovating and subtle alteration which,
without appreciably changing our bodies, has made new creatures of us? In one place and
one only- a new intuition involving a total change in the physiognomy of the universe in
which we move- in other words, in an awakening.
What has made us in four or five generations so different from our forebears(in spite of all
that may be said), so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered
and mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am not mistaken, that we
have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along, and have thereby
realised the formidable problems set thus by this reflective exercise of the human effort."
"There was a time when life held sway over none but slaves and children. To advance, all
it needed was to feed obscure instincts- the bait of food, the urge of reproduction, the
half-confused struggle for a place in the sun, stepping over others, trampling them down if
need be. The aggregate rose automatically and docile, as the resultant of an enormous sum
of egoisms given rein. There was a time too, almost within living memory, when the
workers and the disinherited accepted without reflection the lot which kept them in
servitude to the remainder of society.
Yet when the first spark of thought appeared upon the earth, life found it had brought into
the world a power capable of criticising and judging it. This formidable risk which long lay
dormant, but whose dangers burst out with our first awakening to the idea of evolution.
Like sons who have grown up, like workers who have become 'conscious', we are
discovering that something is developing in the world by means of us, perhaps at our
expense. And what is more serious still is that we have become aware that, in the great
game that is being played, we are the players as well as being the cards and the stakes.
Nothing can go on if we leave the table. Neither can any power force us to remain. Is the
game worth the candle, or are we simply its dupes? This question has hardly been
formulated as yet in man's heart, accustomed for hundreds of centuries to toe the line; it is
a question, however, whose mere murmur, already audibly, infallibly predicts future
rumblings. The last century witnessed the first systematic strikes in industry; the next will
surely not pass without the threat of strikes in the noosphere.
There is a danger that the elements of the world should refuse to serve the world- because
they think; or more precisely that the world should refuse itself when perceiving itself
through reflection. Under our modern disquiet, what is forming and growing is nothing less
than an organic crisis in evolution. And now, at what price and on what contractual bases
will order be restored? On all the evidence, that is the nub of the problem.
In the critical disposition of mind we shall be in from now on, one thing is clear. We shall
never bend our backs to the task that as been allotted us pushing noogenesis onward
except on condition that the effort demanded of us has a chance of succeeding and of
taking us as far as possible. An animal may rush headlong down a blind alley or towards a
precipice. Man will never take a step in a direction he knows to be blocked. There lies
precisely the ill that causes our disquiet.
Having got so far, what are the minimum requirements to be fulfilled before we can say that
the road ahead of us is open? There is only one, but it is everything. It is that we should
be assured the space and the changes to fulfill ourselves, that is to say, to progress till we
arrive(directly or indirectly, individually or collectively) at the utmost limits of ourselves.
This is an elementary request, a basic wage, so to speak veiling nevertheless a stupendous
demand. But is not the end and aim of thought that still unimaginable farthest limit of a
convergent sequence, propagating itself without end and ever higher? Does not the end or
confine of thought consist precisely in not having a confine? Unique in this respect among
all the energies of the universe, consciousness is a dimension to which it is inconceivable
and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling or to suppose that it can double back upon
itself. There are innumerable critical points on the way, but a halt or a reversion is
impossible, and for the simple reason that every increase of internal vision is essentially the
germ of a further vision which includes all the others and carries still farther on.
Hence this remarkable situation- that our mind, by the very fact of being able to discern
infinite horizons ahead, is only able to move by the hope of achieving, through something of
itself, a supreme consummation- without which it would rightly feel itself to be stunted,
frustrated and cheated. By the nature of the work, and correlatively by the requirement of
the worker, a total death, an unscalable wall, on which consciousness would crash and
then for ever disappear, are thus 'incompossible' with the mechanism of conscious
activity(since it would immediately break its mainspring).
The more man becomes man, the less he be prepared to move except towards that which
is interminably and indestructibly new. Some 'absolute' is implied in the very play of his
operative activity. After that 'positive and critical' minds can go on saying as much as they
like that the new generation, less ingenuous than their elders, no longer believes in a future
and in a perfecting of the world. Has it even occurred to those who write and repeat these
things that, if they were right, all spiritual movement on earth would be virtually brought to
a stop? They seem to believe that life would continue its peaceful cycle when deprived of
light, of hope and the attraction of an inexhaustible future. And this is a great mistake.
Flowers and fruit might still go on perhaps for a few years more by habit. But from these
roots the trunk would be well and truly severed. Even on stacks of material energy, even
under the spur of immediate fear or desire, without the taste of life, mankind would soon
stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance. And,
stricken at the very source of the impetus which sustains it, it would disintegrate from
nausea or revolt and crumble into dust. Having once known the taste of a universal and
durable progress, we can never banish it from our minds any more than our intelligence can
escape from the space-time perspective it once has glimpsed. If progress is a myth, that is
to say, if faced by the work involved we can say : 'Whats the good of it all?' our efforts will
flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt- because we are evolution."
"And now, by the very fact that we have measured the truly cosmic gravity of the sickness
that disquiets us, we are put in possession of the remedy that can cure it. 'After the long
series of transformations leading to mean, has the world stopped? Or, if we are still
moving, is it not merely a circle?'
The answer to that uneasiness of the modern world springs up by itself when we formulate
the dilemma in which the analysis of our action has imprisoned us. Either nature is closed
to our demands for futurity, in which case thought, the fruit of millions of years of effort is
stifled, still-born in a self-abortive and absurd universe. Or else an opening exists- that of
the super-soul about our souls; but in that case the way out, if we are to agree to embark
on it, must open out freely unto limitless psychic spaces in a universe to which we can
unhesitatingly entrust ourselves.
Between these two alternatives of absolute optimism or absolute pessimism, there is no
middle way because by its very nature progress is all or nothing. We are confronted
accordingly with two directions and only two : one upwards and the other downwards,
and there is no possibility of finding a half-way house."
"Thus we see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an
epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards
thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of
progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become
conscious of itself, to borrow Julian Huxley's striking expression. It seems to me that our
modern minds (because and inasmuch as they are modern) will never find rest until they
settle down to this view. On this summit and on this summit alone are repose and
illumination waiting for us."
"The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.
With that very simple view, destined, as I suppose, to become as instinctive and familiar to
our descendants as the discovery or a third dimension in space is to a baby, a new
light-inexhaustibly harmonious-bursts upon the world, radiating from ourselves"
"Step by step, from early earth onwards, we have followed going upwards the successive
advances of consciousness in matter undergoing organisation. Having reached the peak,
we can now turn around and, looking downwards, take in the pattern of the whole."
"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 fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being
by the newly acquired consciousness that he was at one with and responsible to an
evolutionary All?"
"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 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 imminent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the
earth, left to itself, seems no longer to able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an
artificially provoked neo-life. Immense and prolonged as the universal groping has been
since the beginning, many possible combinations have been able to slip through the 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 mastering, 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 remodeling 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"
"We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of
super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads
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 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 symmetry 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- anymore than it could in the direction of time and space?"
-The Phenomenon of Man