There can be no doubt that our minds have come to realize that there is a distinction between ‘man at the centre of a static cosmos’ and ‘man at the head of a universe in a state of complexification and interiorization’. For ultimately, when every allowance has been made for subjective effects of outlook, it is evident that man (and more particularly social man) behaves, objectively, like a life ‘of the second species’ in nature: a life that has acquired the faculty of foresight, of invention, and, by deliberate skill, of associating in an ever more marked process of planetary co-adjustment and co-reflection.
Evolution has become in each one of us to some extent master of its movements and at the same time reflectively conscious of the forces which animate it.
Man represents the single magnificent example to be found of a phylum which, instead of branching out, folds back its branches ever more closely—and of this the most immediately evident consequence is the rise in us of the phenomena of co-invention and co-consciousness.