Teilhard described the noosphere on Earth as a crystallization: "A glow rippled outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever-widening circles, he wrote, "till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.
His picture of the noosphere as a thinking membrane covering the planet was almost biological - it was a globe clothing itself with a brain. Teilhard wrote that the noosphere "results from the combined action of two curvatures - the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of the mind. Marshall McLuhan was drawn to the concept of the noosphere. Teilhard's description of this electromagnetic phenomenon became a touchstone for McLuhan's theories of the global "electric culture.
It has been stated over and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth actively and passively simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.
We stand today at the beginning of Teilhard's third phase of evolution, the moment at which the world is covered with the incandescent glow of consciousness. Teilhard characterized this as "evolution becoming conscious of itself. In introducing the idea of tangential energy - the energy of consciousness - as a primary factor in evolution, Teilhard opened the door for a new level of meaning.
The history of the world, he wrote, "would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Artificial life fans take this idea one step further. They see virtual life - Teilhard's tangential energy - trying to break out of organic life into new forms.
The founder of artificial life research, Chris Langton, told reporter Steven Levy that "there are these other forms of life, artificial ones, that want to come into existence. And they are using me as a vehicle for reproduction and for implementation. According to Teilhard, this invisible virtual life has been with us since the beginning.
We now have a vehicle - the Net - that enables us to see virtual life for what it really is. It's not the 0s and the 1s - those are visible. Virtual life is, as Barlow argues, "the space between the 0s and the 1s. It's the pattern of information that is relevant. Invisible life is composed of those life forms emerging in the space between things.
Cyberspace helps us see these forms by taking us past the mechanical barrier. The global mind may be more potential than actual in As de Duve points out, if the noosphere seems laughable now, imagine how today's technology would look to our predecessors. He writes, "A merger of minds into Teilhard's noosphere remains no more than a poetic image at the present time. But so would the notion of satellite television to Lucy [an early Australopithecus hominoid] if she had been capable of conceiving this possibility.
Who can tell what the future has in store? Teilhard warned that evolution is a slow process, beset with setbacks and reversals. We should not question the forces that are connecting our neurons, he argued; rather we should expand our own awareness and embrace our new complexity. Teilhard would readily see the Net as a necessary step along this path. At this point, the earth needs humanity to build the noosphere. As we become conscious of our group mind, a new relationship with the earth emerges.
When that happens, Teilhard wrote, "we have the beginning of a new age. The earth 'gets a new skin. Third Observation 60 3. The Problem of the Two Energies 63 b. The Earth in its Early Stages 1. The Crystallising World b. The Polymerising World 2. The Advent of Life 1. Micro-organisms and Mega-molecules b. A Forgotten Era c. The Cellular Revolution 2. The Milieu b. Smallness and Number c. The Origin of Number D. Inter-relationship and Shape 3. The Expansion of Life 1.
Reproduction b. Multiplication c. Renovation d. Conjugation e. Association f. Controlled Additivity a corollaiy: the ways of life 2. Aggregates of Growth b. The Flourishing of Maturity c. Effects of Distance 3. The Main Lines b. The Dimensions c. Demeter 1. The Birth of Thought 1. The Threshold of the Element: the Hominisa- tion of the Individual b. The Deployment of the Noosphere 1. The Modern Earth 1. The Perception of Space-time b. The Envelopment in Duration c.
The Illumination 2. Modem Disquiet B. The Collective Issue 2,37 I. Forced Coalescence b. Mankind b. Science c. Unanimity chapter ii. Beyond the Collective: the Hyper-Personal 1. The Personal Universe B. The Personalising Universe 2. The Ultimate Earth 1. The Organisation of Research b.
The Discovery of the Human Object c. The Conjunction of Science and Religion 3. The author's style is all his own. In some instances he coins words to express his thought — ' hominisation', for instance, or noosphere ' — and in others he adapts words to his own ends, as when he talks of the ' within ' and the ' without ' of things.
His meaning, however, should become apparent as his thought un- folds, and I have dispensed with cumbrous efforts at defining his terms. As far as possible I have dispensed with italics for his neo- logisms—they are repeated too often to stand italicisation in a work already thickly sprinkled with italics for emphasis.
I have also, in obedience to the conventions of typography in England, eliminated the author's initial capitals for all abstract nouns such as 'science ', ' life ', ' thought ', and also for ' world ', ' universe ', ' man ' and other such key-words of his work. There were dis- advantages in this decision, but at least the printed page looks more normal to the English reader. A number of people nave contributed to the translation, some by substantial paper work, others by suggestions ; and the out- come is in a sense a joint effort.
Outstanding among partici- pants are Mr. Geoffrey Sainsbury, Dr. Tindell Hopwood, Professor D. MacKinnon and Mr. Noel Lindsay. At times versions or suggestions have been conflicting and I have had to take it on myself to make an editorial decision.
The translators' notes appear in square brackets. I should Like to thank my wife, without whom it would have been impossible to produce this version. Pere 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 know- able reality not as a static mechanism but as a process. In conse- quence, 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.
I make no excuse for this personal approach. As I discovered when I first met Pere Teilhard in Paris in , he and I were on the same quest, and had been pursuing parallel roads ever since we were young men in our twenties. Thus, to mention a few signposts which I independently found along my road, already in I had envisaged human evolution and biological evolution as two phases of a single process, but separated by a ' critical point ', after which the properties of the evolving material underwent radical change.
Soon after the first World War, in Essays of a Biologist, I made my first attempt at defining and evaluating evolutionary progress. In my Romanes Lecture on Evolutionary Ethics, I made an attempt which I now see was inadequate, but was at least a step in the right direction to relate the development of moral codes and religions to the general trends of evolution ; in , in my Evolution, the Modem Synthesis, I essayed the first compre- hensive post-Mendelian analysis of biological evolution as a process : and just before meeting Pere Teilhard had written a pamphlet entitled Unesco : its Purpose and Philosophy, where I stressed that such a philosophy must be a global, scientific and evolutionary humanism.
In this, I was searching to establish an ideological basis for man's further cultural evolution, and to define the position of the individual human personality in the process — a search in which I was later much aided by Pere Teilhard's writings, and by our conversations and correspondence.
The Phenomenon of Man is certainly the most important of Pere Teilhard's published works. Of the rest, some, including the essays in La Vision du Passe 1 , reveal earlier developments or later elaborations of his general thought ; while others, like L' Apparition de f 'Homme, are rather more technical. Pere Teilhard starts from the position that mankind in its totality is a phenomenon to be described and analysed like any other phenomenon : it and all its manifestations, including human history and human values, are proper objects for scientific study.
His second and perhaps most fundamental point is the absolute necessity of adopting an evolutionary point of view. Though for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static : they are always processes or parts of processes. For this reason, he uses words like noogenesis, to mean the gradual evolution of mind or mental properties, and repeatedly stresses that we should no longer speak of a cosmology but of a cosmogenesis.
Similarly, he likes to use a pregnant term like hominisation to denote the process by which the original proto- human stock became and is still becoming more truly human, the process by which potential man realised more and more of his possibilities. Indeed, he extends this evolutionary terminology by employing terms like ultra-hominisation to denote the deducible future stage of the process in which man will have so far tran- scended himself as to demand some new appellation.
With this approach he is righdy 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.
Pere Teilhard was keenly aware of the importance of vivid and arresting terminology. Thus in 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 explicidy. By noosphere did he intend simply the total pattern of thinking organisms i.
But certainly noosphere is a valuable and thought-provoking word. He usually uses convergence to denote the tendency of mankind, during its evolution, to superpose centripetal on centrifugal trends, so as to prevent centrifugal differentiation from leading to fragmentation, and eventually to incorporate the results of differentiation in an organised and unified pattern. Human con- vergence was first manifested on the genetic or biological level : after Homo sapiens began to differentiate into distinct races or subspecies, in more scientific terminology migration and inter- marriage prevented, the pioneers from going further, and led to increasing interbreeding between all human variants.
As a result, man is the only successful type which has remained as a single interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a number of biologically separated assemblages like the birds, with about 8, species, or the insects with over half a million.
Cultural differentiation set in later, producing a number of psychosocial units with different cultures. However, these ' inter- thinking groups ', as one writer has called them, are never so sharply separated as are biological species ; and with time, the process known to anthropologists as cultural diffusion, facilitated by migration and improved communications, led to an accelerat- ing counter-process of cultural convergence, and so towards the union of the whole human species into a single mterthinking group based on a single self-developing framework of thought or noosystem.
But in his earner formulation of , in La Vision in Passi p. Before passing to the full implications of human convergence, I must deal with Pere Teilhard's valuable but rather difficult concept of complexijication. This concept includes, as I under- stand it, the genesis of increasingly elaborate organisation during cosmogenesis, as manifested in the passage from subatomic units to atoms, from atoms to inorganic and later to organic mole- cules, thence to the first subcellular living units or self-replicating assemblages of molecules, and then to cells, to multicellular individuals, to cephalised metazoa with brains, to primitive man, and now to civilised societies.
But it involves something more. He speaks of complexi- fication as an all-pervading tendency, involving the universe in all its parts in an enroulement organique sur soi-meme, or by an alternative metaphor, as a reploiement sur soi-meme. He thus envisages the world-stuff as being ' rolled up ' or folded in ' upon itself, both locally and in its entirety, and adds that the pro- cess is accompanied by an increase of energetic ' tension ' in the resultant ' corpuscular ' organisations, or individualised con- structions of increased organisational complexity.
For want of a better English phrase, 1 shall use convergent integration to define the operation of this process of self-complexification. Thus he states that full consciousness as seen in man is to be defined as ' the specific effect of organised complexity '.
But, he continues, comparative study makes it clear that higher animals have minds of a sort, and evolutionary fact and logic demand that minds should have evolved gradually as well as bodies and that accordingly mind-like or ' mentoid ', to employ a barbarous word that I am driven to coin because of its usefulness properties must be present throughout the universe. Thus, in any case, we must infer the presence of potential mind in all material systems, by backward extra- polation from the human phase to the biological, and from the biological to the inorganic.
And according to Pere Teilhard, we must envisage the intensification of mind, the raising of mental potential, as being the necessary consequence of com- plexification, operating by the convergent integration of increas- ingly complex units of organisation.
The sweep of his thought goes even further. He seeks to link the evolution of mind with the concept of energy. If I under- stand him aright, he envisages two forms of energy, or perhaps two modes in which it is manifested — energy in the physicists' sense, measurable or calculable by physical methods, and ' psychic energy ' which increases with the complexity of organised units. It is, if you like, visionary : but it is the product of a comprehensive and coherent vision.
It might have been better to say that complexity of a sort is a necessary prerequisite for mental evolution rather than its cause. Some biologists, indeed, would claim that mind is generated solely by the complexification of certain types of organisation, namely brains.
However, such logic appears to me narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even 1 See, e. Cuenot, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paris, , p. We certainly need some new terms in this field: perhaps neurergy and psychergy would serve. Indeed an isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as an isolated human individual.
I would prefer to say that mind is generated by or in complex organisations of living matter, capable of receiving information of many qualities or modalities about events both in the outer world and in itself, of synthesising and processing that information in various organised forms, and of utilising it to direct present and future action — in other words, by higher animals with their sense-organs, nerves, brains, and muscles.
Perhaps, indeed, organisations of such complexity can only arise in evolution when their construction enables them to incorporate and interiorise varied external information : cer- tainly no non-living, non-sentient organisation has reached anything like this degree of elaboration.
In human or psychosocial evolution, convergence has cer- tainly led to increased complexity. In Pere Teilhard's view, the increase of human numbers combined with the improvement of human communications has fused all the parts of the noosphere together, has increased the tension within it, and has caused it to become ' infolded ' upon itself, and therefore more highly organised.
In the process of convergence and coalescence, what we may metaphorically describe as the psychosocial temperature rises. Mankind as a whole will accordingly achieve more intense, more complex, and more integrated mental activity, which can guide the human species up the path of progress to higher levels of hominisation. Pere Teilhard was a strong visualiser.
He saw with his mind's eye that ' the banal fact of the earth's roundness ' — the sphericity of man's environment — was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environ- ment, man's thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards : it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. When I read his discussion of the subject, I visualised this selective web of living thought as the bounding structure of evolving man, marking him off from the rest of the universe and yet facilitating exchange with it : playing the same sort of role in delimiting the human unit of evolution and yet encouraging the complexification of its contents, as does the cell-membrane for the animal cell.
Years later, when at the University of California in , this same vivid imagination led Pere Teilhard to draw a parallel between the cyclotron generating immense intensities of physical energy in the inwardly accelerating spiral orbits of its fields of force, and the entire noosphere with its fields of thought curved round upon themselves to generate new levels of ' psychical energy '- 1 How his imagination would have kindled at the sight of the circular torus of Zeta, within whose bounding curves are generated the highest physical energies ever produced by man!
Pere Teilhard, extrapolating from the past into the future, envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a final state, 1 which he called ' point Omega ', as opposed to the Alpha of elementary material particles and their energies.
If I understand him aright, he considers that two factors are co-operat- ing to promote this further complexification of die noosphere. One is the increase of knowledge about the universe at large, from the galaxies and stars to human societies and individuals. The other is the increase of psychosocial pressure on the surface of our planet. The result of the one is that the noosphere incor- porates ever more facts of the cosmos, including the facts of its general direction and its trends in time, so as to become more 1 En regardant un cyclotron : in Rechcrches et dibats, Paris, April , p.
It might have been better to think of it merely as a novel state or mode of organization, beyond which the human imagination cannot at present pierce, though perhaps the strange facts of extra-sensory perception unearthed by the infant science of parapsychology may give us a clue to a possible more ultimate state.
The result of the other is the increased unification and the increased intensity of the system of human thought. The combined result, according to Pere Teilhard, will be the attainment of point Omega, where the noosphere will be intensely unified and will have achieved a ' hyperpersonal ' organisation. Here his thought is not fully clear to me. Sometimes he seems to equate this future hyperpersonal psychosocial organisation with an emergent Divinity : at one place, for instance, he speaks of the trend as a Christogenesis ; and elsewhere he appears not to be guarding himself sufBciendy against the dangers of personi- fying the non-personal elements of reality.
Sometimes, too, he seems to envisage as desirable the merging of individual human variety in this new unity. Though many scientists may, as I do, find it impossible to follow him all the way in his gallant attempt to reconcile the supernatural elements in Christianity with the facts and implications of evolution, this in no way detracts from the positive value of his naturalistic general approach.
In any case the concept of a hyperpersonal mode of organisa- tion sprang from Pere Teilhard's conviction of the supreme importance of personality.
A developed human being, as he rightly pointed out, is not merely a more highly individualised individual. He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration — integration of the self with the outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other.
He is a person, an organism which has transcended individuality in personality. This attain- ment of personality was an essential element in man's past and present evolutionary success : accordingly its fuller achievement must be an essential aim for his evolutionary future.
He realised that the appearance of human personality was the culmination of two major evolutionary trends — the trend towards more extreme individuation, and that towards more extensive interrelation and co-operation : persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation.
His understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualised and then personalised gave him a number of valuable insights. Basically, the process depends on cephalisation — the differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense- organs providing information about the outer world and also the main organ of co-ordination or brain.
With his genius for fruitful analogy, he points out that the process of evolution on earth is itself now in the process of becoming cephalised. Before the appearance of man, life con- sisted of a vast array of separate branches, linked only by an unorganised pattern of ecological interaction. The incipient development of mankind into a single psychosocial unit, with a single noosystem or common pool of thought, is providing the evolutionary process with the rudiments of a head.
It remains for our descendants to organise this global noosystem more adequately, so as to enable mankind to understand the process of evolution on earth more fully and to direct it more adequately. I had independently expressed something of the same sort, by saying that in modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself — a phrase which I found delighted Pere Teilhard.
His formulation, however, is more profound and more seminal : it implies that we should consider inter- thinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny it is to realise new possibilities for evolving life on this planet. Once he had grasped and faced the fact of man as an evolu- tionary phenomenon, the way was open towards a new and comprehensive system of thought.
It remained to draw the fullest conclusions from this central concept of man as the spearhead of evolution on earth, and to follow out the implica- tions of this approach in as many fields as possible.
The biologist may perhaps consider that in The Phenomenon of Man he paid insufficient attention to genetics and the possibilities and limita- tions of natural selection, 1 the theologian that his treatment of the problems of sin and suffering was inadequate or at least unorthodox, the social scientist that he failed to take sufficient account of the facts of political and social history.
But he saw that what was needed at the moment was a broad sweep and a comprehensive treatment. This was what he essayed in The Phenomenon of Man. In my view he achieved a remarkable success, and opened up vast territories of thought to further exploration and detailed mapping.
The facts of Pere Teilhard's life help to illuminate the develop- ment of his thought. His father was a small landowner in Auvergne, a gentleman farmer who was also an archivist, with a taste for natural history.
Pierre was bom in , the fourth in a family of eleven. At the age of ten he went as a boarder to a Jesuit College where, besides doing well in all prescribed subjects of study, he became devoted to field geology and mineralogy.
When eighteen years old, he decided to become a Jesuit, and entered their order. At the age of twenty-four, after 1 Though in his Institute for Human Studies he envisaged a section of Eugenics. In the course of his three years in Egypt, and a further four studying theology in Sussex, he acquired real competence in geology and palaeontology ; and before being ordained priest in , a reading of Bergson's Evolution Cre'atrice had helped to inspire in him a profound interest in the general facts and theories of evolution.
Returning to Paris, he pursued his geological studies and started working under Marcellin Boule, the leading prehistorian and archaeologist of France, in his Institute of Human Palaeontology at the Museum of Natural History.
It was here that he met his lifelong friend and colleague in the study of prehistory, the Abbe - Breuil, and that his interests were first directed to the subject on which his life's work was centred — the evolution of man. In 19 1 3 he visited the site where the famous and now notorious Piltdown skull had recently been unearthed, in company with its discoverer Dr. This was his first introduction to the excitements of palaeontological discovery and scientific controversy.
During the first World War he served as a stretcher-bearer, receiving the Military Medal and the Legion of Honour, and learnt a great deal about his fellow men and about his own nature. The war strengthened his sense of religious vocation, and in he made a triple vow of poverty, chastity and obedience.
By the major goals of his life were clearly indicated. Professionally, he had decided to embark on a geological career, with special emphasis on palaeontology. As a thinker, he had reached a point where the entire phenomenal universe, including man, was revealed as a process of evolution, and he found himself impelled to build up a generalised theory or philosophy of evolutionary process which would take account of human history and human personality as well as of biology, and from which one could draw conclusions as to the future evolution of man on earth.
Returning to the Sorbonne, he took his Doctorate in He had already become Professor of Geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris, where his lectures attracted great attention among the students three of whom are now teaching in the University of Paris. In , however, he went to China for a year on behalf of the Museum, on a palaeontological mission directed by another Jesuit, Pere Licent. His Lettres de Voyage reveal the impression made on him by the voyage through the tropics, and by his first experience of geological research in the desert remoteness of Mongolia and north-western China.
This expedition inspired La Messe sur k Monde, a remarkable and truly poetical essay which was at one and the same time mystical and realistic, religious and philosophical. A shock awaited him after liis return to France. Some of the ideas which he had expressed in his lectures about original sin and its relation to evolution, were regarded as unorthodox by his religious superiors, and he was forbidden to continue teaching. In he returned to work with Pere Licent in China, where he was destined to stay, with brief returns to France and excur- sions to the United States, to Abyssinia, India, Burma and Java, for twenty years.
Here, as scientific adviser to the Geological Survey of China, centred first at Tientsin and later at Peking, he met and worked with outstanding palaeontologists of many nations, and took part in a number of expeditions, including the Citroen Croisiere Jaune under Haardt, and Davidson Black's expedition which unearthed the skull of Peking man.
In he was appointed Director of the Laboratory of Advanced Studies in Geology and Palaeontology in Paris, but the outbreak of war prevented his return to France. His enforced isolation in China during the six war years, painful and depressing though it often was, undoubtedly helped his inner spiritual development as the isolation of imprisonment helped to mature the thought and character of Nehru and many other Indians.
It was a nice stroke of irony that the action of Pere Teilhard's religious superiors in barring him from teaching in France because of his ideas on human evolution, should have led him to China and brought him into intimate association with one of the most important discoveries in that field, and driven him to enlarge and consolidate his ' dangerous thoughts '.
During the whole of this period he was writing essays and books on various aspects and implications of evolution, culminat- ing in in the manuscript of Le Phenomene Humain. But he never succeeded in obtaining permission to publish any of his controversial or major works. This caused him much distress, for he was conscious of a prophetic mission : but he faithfully observed his vow of obedience.
Professionally too he was extremely active throughout this period. He contributed a great deal to our knowledge of palaeolithic cultures in China and neighbouring areas, and to the general understanding of the geology of the Far East.
This preoccupation with large-scale geology led him to take an interest in the geological development of the world's continents : each continent, he considered, had made its own special contribution to biological evolution. He also did important palaeontological work on the evolution of various mammalian groups.
The wide range of his vision made him impatient of over- specialisation, and of the timidity which refuses to pass from detailed study to broad syndiesis. With his conception of man- kind as at the same time an unfinished product of past evolution and an agency of distinctive evolution to come, he was par- ticularly impatient of what he felt as the narrowness of those anthropologists who limited themselves to a study of physical structure and the details of primitive social life.
He wanted to deal with the entire human phenomenon, as a transcendence of biological by psychosocial evolution. And he had considerable success in redirecting along these lines die institutions with which he was connected. On his return to Paris, he was enjoined by his superiors not to write any more on philosophical subjects : and in he was forbidden to put forward his candidature for a Professorship in the College de France in succession to the Abbe" Breuil, though it was known that this, the highest academic position to which he could aspire, was open to him.
But perhaps the heaviest blow awaited him in , when his application for permission to publish Le Groupe Zoologique Humain a recasting of Le Phinomene Humain was refused in Rome. By way of compensation he was awarded the signal honour of being elected Membre de 1'Institut, as well as having previously become a Corresponding Member of the Acadimie des Sciences, an officer of the Legion d'Homwur, and a director of research in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Already in he had been invited to visit the U. The Wermer-Gren Foundation also sponsored his two visits to South Africa, where he was able to study at first hand the remarkable discoveries of Broom and Dart concerning Australopithecus, that near-ancestor of man, and to lay down a plan for the future co-ordination of palaeontological and archaeological work in this area, so important as a centre of hominid evolution.
His position in France became increasingly difficult, and in 1 he moved his headquarters to New York. Here, at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he played an important role in framing anthropological policy, and made valuable contribu- tions to the international symposia which it organised.
And here, in , I had the privilege of working with him in one of the remarkable discussion groups set up as part of the Columbia Bicentennial celebrations. Just before this, he had returned to France for a brief but stimulating month of discussion. He was prevailed on to leave his manuscripts to a friend. They therefore could be published after his death, since per- mission to publish is only required for the work of a living writer.
The prospect of eventual publication must have been a great solace to him, for he certainly regarded his general and philosophical writings as the keystone of his life's work, and felt it his supreme duty to proclaim the fruits of his labour.
It was my privilege to have been a friend and correspondent of Pere Teilhard for nearly ten years ; and it is my privilege now to introduce this, his most notable work, to English- speaking readers. His influence on the world's thinking is bound to be im- portant. Through his combination of wide scientific knowledge with deep religious feeling and a rigorous sense of values, he has forced theologians to view their ideas in the new perspective of evolution, and scientists to see the spiritual implications of their knowledge.
He has both clarified and unified our vision of reality. In the light of that new comprehension, it is no longer possible to maintain that science and religion must operate in thought-tight compartments or concern separate sectors of life ; they are both relevant to the whole of human existence.
The religiously-minded can no longer turn their backs upon the natural world, or seek escape from its imperfections in a super- natural world ; nor can the materialistically-minded deny importance to spiritual experience and religious feeling. Like him, we must face the phenomena.
But, like him, we must not take refuge in abstractions of generalities. He always took account of the specific realities of man's present situation, though set against the more general realities of long-term evolution ; and he always endeavoured to think concretely, in terms of actual patterns of organisation — their development, their mode of operation and their effects.
As a result, he has helped us to define more adequately both our own nature, the general evolutionary process, and our place and role in it. Thus clarified, the evolution of life becomes a comprehensible phenomenon.
It is an anti-cntropic process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its degradation of energy and its tendency to uniformity. With the aid of the sun's energy, biological evolution marches uphill, pro- ducing increased variety and higher degrees of organisation. It also produces more varied, more intense and more highly organised mental activity or awareness.
During evolution, awareness or if you prefer, the mental properties of living matter becomes increasingly important to organisms, until in mankind it becomes the most important characteristic of life, and gives the human type its dominant position.
After this critical point has been passed, evolution takes on a new character : it becomes primarily a psychosocial process, based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its results, and working through an organised system of awareness, a combined operation of knowing, feeling and willing. In man, at least during the historical and proto-historical periods, evolution has been characterised more by cultural than by genetic or biological change. On this new psychosocial level, the evolutionary process leads to new types and higher degrees of organisation.
On the one hand there are new patterns of co-operation among indi- viduals — co-operation for practical control, for enjoyment, for education, and notably in the last few centuries, for obtaining new knowledge ; and on the other there arc new patterns of thought, new organisations of awareness and its products.
Pere Teilhard enables us to see which possi- bilities are in the long run desirable. What is more, he has helped to define the conditions of advance, the conditions which will permit an increase of fulfilment and prevent an increase of frustration.
The conditions of advance are these : global unity of mankind's noetic organisation or system of awareness, but a high degree of variety within that unity ; love, with goodwill and full co-operation ; personal integration and internal har- mony ; and increasing knowledge.
In that Book, he presents a survey of the taxonomy of life, proceeding from its dimly seen origins in the primordial ooze, relentlessly proliferating in a fantastic diversity of forms through various phyla, orders and families to the placental mammals.
At the beginning of its final chapter, DEMETER , he postulates that expansion of diversity, this continual growth of complexity has a purpose pages , emphasis in original :. That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now, as I have said, common ground among scientists.
Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question. Asked whether life is going anywhere at the end of its transformations, nine biologists out of ten will today say no, even passionately. Science in its development—and even, as I shall show, mankind in its march—is marking time at this moment, because men's minds are reluctant to recognise that evolution has a precise orientation and a privileged axis.
Weakened by this fundamental doubt, the forces of research are scattered, and there is no determination to build the earth.
Leaving aside all anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, I believe I can see a direction and a line of progress for life, a line and a direction which are in fact so well marked that I am convinced their reality will be universally admitted by the science of tomorrow. And I want here to make the reader understand why. And this direction , he explains, is the expansion of consciousness within , as revealed without by the increasing sophistication of the nervous system, which so far has reached its highest level in our own species.
Chapter 2 of Book 3 confirms a suspicion I've held almost from the beginning: This is a poor translation. The very first paragraph of the chapter is evidence.
Page In order to multiply the contacts necessary for its gropings and to be able to store up the multifarious variety of its riches, life is obliged to move forward in terms of deep masses. And when therefore its course emerges from the gorges in which a new mutation has so to speak strangled it, the narrower the channel from which it emerges and the vaster the surface it has to cover with its flow, the more it needs to re-group itself in multitude.
I translate this translation thus: 5 "In order to keep evolving by means of chance mutations, and to preserve these evolutionary changes from generation to generation, life must proliferate in vast numbers. Wall had time for some "gropings" of his own, in search of English words more apt to the deeper — as opposed to the literal — meaning of the French text he was translating. But evidently he did not bother. This lack doubtlessly explains much of the difficulty I've had with the book.
And henceforth I'll stop complaining about awkward or unclear wording. But I'll continue to record any errata I find. Teilhard, in this chapter, mixes fact and conjecture. He discusses the fossils of Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus, noting that their structure places them between apes and man, and that most paleontologists classify them as "pre-hominids".
Then, in what can only be called speculation, he asserts that "they were already, in the full sense of the term, intelligent beings". He does, however, stipulate that this does not mean intelligence on our present-day level. His justification for this conclusion seems to be that such a radical mutation as the ability to think had to have appeared contemporaneously with major morphological changes. As he puts it on page emphasis in original :. That they were so seems to me stipulated by the general mechanism of phylogenesis.
A mutation as fundamental as that of thought, a mutation which gives its specific impetus to the whole human group, could not in my opinion have appeared in the middle of the journey ; it could not have happened half-way up the stalk. It dominates the whole edifice.
Its place must therefore be beneath every recognisable verticil in the unattainable depths of the peduncle, and thus beneath those creatures which however pre-hominid in cranial structure are already clearly situated above the point of origin and blossoming of our human race. Luckily for me, the words "verticil" and "peduncle" are in any good dictionary.
They mean, roughly and respectively, stalk and branching-point. Teilhard says the peduncle is unattainable because any change occurring at that point is present in one or a few individuals, and thus almost certainly missing from the fossil record. This is our view today. However, we are not so ready to pinpoint the origin of mutations which leave no morphological traces. In the case of human-level thought, we prefer to deduce its presence from behavior, as revealed by artifacts like tools, cave art, or burial gifts.
It is one of the saving graces of Teilhard's world-view, owing perhaps to his Christian spirit and his experiences in World War I, that his synthesis is profoundly egalitarian. He states this throughout the book, whenever arguing against isolation — by which he means chiefly racism or elitism — but never more clearly than on pages of Book 4 emphasis in original :.
Also false and against nature is the racial ideal of one branch draining off for itself alone all the sap of the tree and rising over the death of other branches. To reach the sun nothing less is required than the combined growth of the entire foliage.
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together , in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must now make clearer.
This final Book, titled SURVIVAL , focuses on evolution surviving the forces that could stifle its progress: the tendency to isolation, previously mentioned; the sense of discouragement when the goal seems so distant and short-sighted conflicts keep erupting.
Profoundly hopeful, it forms a fitting cap to his long recitation on the subject of directed evolution leading inevitably toward a still-indescribable state of "ultra-homanisation". In it he remarks that he has not mentioned evil previously. This is incorrect; he has mentioned it in several places.
But it is true that those mentions were brief. So, alas, is this appendix.
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