Just as the various cells and members of the body grow and unite to form a single living being and find their ultimate perfection only by constituting that being, so the constant goal of individual and national development should be the unity of mankind. Both individuals and nations must achieve this unity if we are ever to have any fulness of life on the earth.
For anyone who can read the chart of facts recorded by modern science, it is now clear that mankind is not an accidental phenomenon occurring by chance on one of the smallest stars in the sky. Mankind represents the culmination of the whole movement of matter and life, so far as it is within the range of our experience.
How can we unite all the positive values of civilization in a totality which will also respect individual values?
Across all denominations, across all the conventional barriers which still exist, we shall see the living atoms of the universe seek each other out, find each other, and organize themselves.
I do not believe in the supreme effectiveness of instinct of preservation and fear. It is not the fear of perishing, but the ambition to live which has thrown man into the exploration of nature, the conquest of the atmosphere and the heavens.
The phrase “Sense of Earth” should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. In principle there is no feeling which has a firmer foundation in nature, or greater power. But in fact there is also no feeling which awakens so belatedly, since it can become explicit only when our consciousness has expended beyond the broadening, but still far too restricted, circles of family, country, and race, and has finally discovered that the only truly natural and real human Unity is the Spirit of Earth.
Love is the most universal, formidable, and mysterious of cosmic energies. From the point of view of spiritual Evolution, it seems that we might be able to give a name and a value to this strange energy of love. Could it not be, in essence, the attraction which is exercised upon each conscious element by the center of the universe? The call toward the great union, whose attainment is the only real business in nature…?
What an increase there is in his powers when, in research or in battle, Man catches the breath of affection or comradeship; what fulfillment when, in the instant of danger or enthusiasm, he finds in a flash that he has glimpsed the wonders of a kindred spirit. These faint glimmerings should help us realize what a formidable power and joy and capacity for action still slumber in the human spirit.
The resources we enjoy today, the powers and secrets of science we have discovered, cannot be absorbed by the narrow system of individual and national divisions which have so far served the leaders of the world. The age of nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off our ancient prejudices, and to build the earth.
The more I look at the world as a scientist, the less I see any other possible biological result apart from its active and conscious unity.
The more man is man, the more he will feel the need to devote himself to something which is greater than he is. Is it not that which we can ascertain around us? At what moment in the Noösphere has there been a more urgent need to find a faith, a hope to give meaning and soul, to the immense organism we are building?
By the capital event of hominization the most “advanced” part of the cosmos found itself personalized. This simple change in a variable introduced for the future a two-fold condition of existence which cannot be escaped. Since everything in the universe, starting from Man, takes place in the personalized being, the ultimate Term of the universal Convergence must also possess (in a supreme degree) the quality of a Person.
Religion is not an option or a strictly individual intuition, but represents the long unfolding, the collective experience of all mankind, of the existence of God—God reflecting himself personally on the organized sum of thinking beings, to guarantee a sure result of creation, and to lay down exact laws for man’s hesitant activities.
Human energy presents itself to our view as the term of a vast process in which the whole mass of the universe is involved. In us the evolution of the world towards the spirit becomes conscious. From that moment, our perfection, our interest, our salvation as elements of creation can only be to press on with this evolution with all our strength.
What proportion of activity in the world today, in money, manpower, and effort, is devoted to exploring and conquering the still unknown areas of the world? At present most men still merely understand strength, the key and symbol of violence, in its most primitive and savage form of war. But let the time come, as come it will, when the masses will realize that the true human successes are those which triumph over the mysteries of matter and of life. At that moment a decisive hour will sound for mankind, when the spirit of discovery absorbs all the momentum contained in the spirit of war. It represents in consequence that part of human strength which there is the greatest interest in organizing.
Beyond a certain degree of sublimation, by the unlimited possibilities of intuition and inter-relation which it brings, spiritualized love penetrates into the unknown. In every field we will begin to live constantly in the presence and with the thought of the whole. There is nothing more significant, from the point of view of human energy, than the spontaneous appearance, and, ultimately, the systematic cultivation of a “cosmic sense” of this kind. Through such a sense, Men cease to be self-contained individuals, and join in a common cause. In them, henceforth, the spiritual energy of the element is finally ready to integrate itself in the total energy of the Noösphere.
The first lineaments of a common consciousness contain in themselves a vital need to make themselves clear and to prolong themselves internally. Intellectually, the progress of science is proceeding to construct a synthesis of the laws of Matter and Life, which, fundamentally, is nothing else but a collective act of perception; the world seen in the same coherent perspective by the whole of mankind.
Picture an earth where all men are clearly and primarily decided on advancing together to a passionately desired Being, in whom each recognizes in what was most incommunicable in his neighbor a living participation.
The earth is still far from having completed its sidereal evolution. True, we can imagine all sorts of catastrophes which might intervene to cut short this great development. But for 300 million years now, Life has been going on paradoxically in the midst of improbability. Does that not indicate that it is marching forward, sustained by some complicity in the in the motive forces of the Universe?
Our modern world was created in less than ten thousand years, and in the last two hundred years it has changed faster than in all the previous millenniums.
Life is moving towards unification.
To be super spiritualized in God, must not mankind first be born and grow in conformity with the whole system of what we call evolution? The sense of earth opening and flowering upwards in the sense of God, and the sense of God rooted and nourished from below in the sense of earth. The transcendent personal God and the universe in evolution, no longer forming two antagonistic poles of attraction, but entering into a hierarchic conjunction to uplift the human mass in a single tide.