¶1THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
¶51*The Phenomenon of Man* is a very remarkable work by a very remarkable human being. Père Teilhard de Chardin was at the same time a Jesuit Father and a distinguished palaeontologist. In *The Phenomenon of Man* he has effected a threefold synthesis—of the material and physical world with the world of mind and spirit ; of the past with the future ; and of variety with unity, the many with the one. He achieves this by examining every fact and every subject of his investigation *sub specie evolutionis*, with reference to its development in time and to its evolutionary position. Conversely, he is able to envisage the whole of knowable reality not as a static mechanism but as a process. In consequence, he is driven to search for human significance in relation to the trends of that enduring and comprehensive process ; the measure of his stature is that he so largely succeeded in the search. I would like to introduce *The Phenomenon of Man* to English readers by attempting a summary of its general thesis, and of what appear to me to be its more important conclusions.
¶58With this approach he is rightly and indeed inevitably driven to the conclusion that, since evolutionary phenomena (of course including the phenomenon known as man) are processes, they can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins : they must be defined by their direction, their inherent possibilities (including of course also their limitations), and their deducible future trends. He quotes with approval Nietzsche's view that man is unfinished and must be surpassed or completed ; and proceeds to deduce the steps needed for his completion.
¶59Père Teilhard was keenly aware of the importance of vivid and arresting terminology. Thus in 1925 he coined the term *noosphere* to denote the sphere of mind, as opposed to, or rather superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life, and acting as a transforming agency promoting hominisation (or as I would put it, progressive psychosocial evolution). He may perhaps be criticised for not defining the term more explicitly. By *noosphere* did he intend simply the total pattern of thinking organisms (i.e. human beings) and their activity, including the patterns of their interrelations : or did he intend the special environment of man, the systems of organised thought and its products in which men move and have their being, as fish swim and reproduce in rivers and the sea ?^1 Perhaps it might have been better to restrict *noosphere* to the first-named sense, and to use something like *noosystem* for the second. But certainly *noosphere* is a valuable and thought-provoking word.
¶255² These pages had been written for some time when I was surprised to find their substance in some masterly lines recently written by J. B. S. Haldane : 'We do not find obvious evidence of life or mind in so-called inert matter, and we naturally study them most easily where they are most completely manifested ; but if the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them, at least in rudimentary forms, all through the universe.' And he goes on to add these words which my readers would do well to recall when I come to unveil (with all due reservations and corrections) the perspective of the 'Omega Point' : 'Now, if the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.' (Essay on Science and Ethics in *The Inequality of Man*, Chatto, 1932, p. 113.) What I say is thus not absurd. Moreover, any metaphysician must rejoice to discover that even in the eyes of physics the idea of absolutely brute matter (that is to say, of a pure 'transient') is only a first very rough approximation of our experience.
¶743Thought is born.
¶988Thus 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.
¶1046Hence 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 [*exigence*] 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).
¶1065The first is that there is for us, in the future, under some form or another, at least collective, not only survival but also *super-life*.
¶1075Less theoretical and less extreme, but all the more insidious, is another doctrine of ' progress by isolation ' which, at this very moment, is fascinating large sections of mankind—the doctrine of the selection and election of races. Flattering to collective egotism, keener, nobler and more easily aroused than individual egotism, racialism has the virtue in its perspectives of accepting and extending rigorously, just as they occur, the lines of the tree of life. What indeed does the history of the animate world show us but a succession of ramifications, springing up one after the other, one on the top of the other, through the success and domination of a privileged group ? And why should we be exempt from the general rule ? Why should there not be once again between us the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest ; the trial of strength ? The superman should, like any other stem, be an offshoot from a single bud of mankind.
¶1110The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of *all together*, in a direction in which *all together*1 can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must make clearer.
¶1139We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of consciousnesses 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.
¶1153THE 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.
¶1171Seen from this point of view, the universe, without losing any of its immensity and thus without suffering any anthropomorphism, 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 other way round*. In the perspective of a noogenesis, time and space become truly humanised—or 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.
¶1189Considered 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 recognised 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 prodigiously 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 the forces of love, the fragments of the world 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.
¶1192We 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 we 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 are 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?
¶1195To 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 universe, a sense of the *all*, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted 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 consistently to ignore this fundamental vibration whose ring can be heard by every practised ear at the 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 born 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 ' ?
¶1198But, 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 philanthropic 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.
¶1207First 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 coexistence. 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.
¶1213¹ See for example that curious book by Wells, *The Anatomy of Frustration*, which eloquently bears witness to the faith and the misgivings of modern man.
¶1308To 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*.
¶1329The universe fulfilling itself in a synthesis of centres in perfect conformity with the laws of union. God, the Centre of centres. In that final vision the Christian dogma culminates. And so exactly, so perfectly does this coincide with the Omega Point that doubtless I should never have ventured to envisage the latter or formulate the hypothesis rationally if, in my consciousness as a believer, I had not found not only its speculative model but also its living reality.
¶1352To confirm the presence at the summit of the world of what we have called the Omega Point,1 do we not find here the very cross-check we were waiting for ? Here surely is the ray of sunshine striking through the clouds, the reflection onto what is ascending of that which is already on high, the rupture of our solitude. The palpable influence on our world of *an other* and supreme Someone . . . Is not the Christian phenomenon, which
¶1356*Peking, June 1938-June 1940*