By ‘human energy’ I mean the sum total of physico-chemical energies either simply incorporated in, or (at a higher degree of assimilation) cerebralized in, the human planetary mass at a given moment: the mass in question being considered in its linked totality, not only of its biological constituents, but also of its artificially constructed mechanisms.
One could define the human (considered from the point of view of physics) as a unique domain of the world, in which cosmic energy is caught up in a sort of vortex of self-arrangement and so concentrates and differentiates itself ‘exponentially’.
If such a dynamic trend (from the non-arranged to the arranged) does exist in the universe, it must be a matter of supreme importance—as much to us as individuals, produced by that trend, as to the universe in which it originates—that the movement continue, and become more pronounced, and reach as perfect as possible a consummation in the future.
Among the very lowest living beings, this response to stimulus of organic matter is to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from an elaborated system of physico-chemical reactions from which consciousness would appear to be excluded. At a higher level, however, with the appearance of nervous systems, the reality of an energizing function exercised by knowledge becomes evident. The activation of the living being—the more living it is, and in virtue of what is most living in it—calls ever more insistently, if it is to become effective, for the intervention of some fear, some repugnance, or (most of all) for some attraction.
As a result of his extreme cerebration, man is not only the most responsive to stimulation of any living being known to us; but he is also the only one for whom the stimulating impulse without which there can be no action, is not confined to the perception of an immediate end, but comes from a confrontation with the whole of the future.
From the moment when man recognizes that he is in a state of evolution, he can no longer progress unless he develops in himself a deep-rooted, passionate zest for his own evolution: and there is the further reason that it is precisely this dynamic zest that could be vitiated beyond repair and annihilated by the prospect, however far ahead it may lie, of a definitive and total death.
If the world is not automatically to destroy its own dynamic drive in step with its hominization, it cannot be of the ‘closed’ type. Every law of energetics insists that it shall ‘open out’ ahead.
Man cannot think without his thought being involved in and combined additively with that of all other thinking beings.
Hominization, as witnessed by us in its operation, can only end (provided it wins through) in a paroxysm—and that can hardly be defined other than as a higher critical point of reflection.
If we really wish to unify the real, we should completely reverse the values—that is, we should consider the whole of thermodynamics as an unstable and ephemeral by-effect of the concentration on itself of what we call ‘consciousness’ or ‘spirit’.
An interior energy of unification (true energy) gradually emerging, under the influence of organization, from the superficial system of actions and reactions that make up the physico-chemical.