The problem is not so much to know what man is, or even how man, historically, appeared on earth, but rather to decide whether, in the framework of time, there is or is not, for us, something ultra-human, lying ahead of the human.
Taken in its organico-cultural totality, mankind represents a specifically defined biological unit.
Under the network of demographic, economic, political, and cultural forces which daily force us into ever closer mutual contact, man forms a group, terrestrial in scale, ever more closely welded together. It is still, however, seldom that anyone considers attributing a specifically ‘natural’ value to this evident totalizing upon itself of our species. Human civilization is spoken of as a secondary and superficial effect of social adjustment, not to be confused with the true biological phenomena of evolution.
In nature, every arrangement whose realization has the effect of producing a rise in “psychic temperature” (or, if you prefer, the “degree of consciousness”) of the system, is, and must be accepted as, specifically organic and evolutive in its stuff.
Mankind, taken collectively, is certainly not (as is so often said) an aggregate or a mixture: scientifically, it can be included only among the products of synthesis. This means that henceforth we can make no further progress in biology without recognizing and distinguishing, in the spectrum of animate substances, at the other extreme from the ultra-microscopic living proteins, certain colossal units, planetary in dimensions.
We have no difficulty in seeing that a chain process is initiated—one that includes, in the same formula, the complete unfolding of life on earth from its most humble pre-cellular stages up to the immeasurable reality of a human planetary organism.
Mankind is no longer what it is still too often said to be, a dead end of evolution; but, by the planned ultra-arrangement of its reflective particles it is coming to ultra-humanize itself though the total convergence of its powers and its elements in the direction of some ‘ultra-reflection’—at the head of evolution and on its main axis.
Reflection: the state of a consciousness which has become capable of seeing and foreseeing itself. To think is not only to know, but to know that one knows.