In the infinitely great, the effects of relativity. In the infinitely small, quanta effects. In very great complexes, what? But why not, precisely, consciousness and freedom?
Absolutely inert and totally brute matter does not exist. Every element contains, at least to an infinitesimal degree, some germ of inwardness and spontaneity, that is to say of consciousness.
In science (and elsewhere) the greatest test of truth is coherence and productiveness. For our minds, the more order a theory imposes on our vision of the world and, at the same time, the more capable it shows itself of directing and sustaining the forward movement of our powers of research and construction, the more certain that theory is. (True theory = the most advantageous.)
Matter and consciousness are bound together: not in the sense that consciousness becomes directly measurable, but in the sense that it becomes organically and physically rooted in the same cosmic process with which physics is concerned.
Man is the highest, the richest, the most significant object within range of our investigations, because it is in him that cosmic evolution is culminating at this moment before our eyes, having become, by our reflexion, conscious of itself.
One evident characteristic of the curve of moleculization, as drawn, is that it is not closed, not stopped. At present it ends with man. But dare we think that it can and should extend further? And how? Man is momentarily a climax in the universe; and a leading shoot also, to the extent that by his intense psychism he confirms the reality and fixes the direction of a rise of consciousness through things. But may he not also be the bud from which something more complicated and more centred than man himself should emerge?
We know atoms as sums of nuclei and electrons; molecules as sums of atoms; cells as collections of molecules. Could there not be, in formation ahead of us, humanity as the sum of organised persons?
It is impossible still to form an idea of the modes or appearances that might be adopted by this formidable hyper-cell, this brain of brains, this Noosphere woven by all intelligences at once on the surface of the earth. All that we can say of it is that, in this absolutely new (and therefore unimaginable) type of bio-synthesis, individual liberties can only be imagined as carried to their maximum by the very play of their mutual association.
At first, we could only note with astonishment, but not explain the persistent rise of a fraction of the world, against the current, towards ever more improbable states of complexity. Now we understand that this paradoxical movement is sustained by a prime mover ahead.
Evolution assumes its true figure for our mind and our heart. It is certainly not ‘creative’, as science for a brief moment believed; but it is the expression of creation, for our experience, in time and space.
The world cannot continue to advance towards greater complexity and consciousness except by making an ever more explicit place for the forces of expectation and hope, that is to say for religion.
Let us imagine an observer standing on a star, who has found the means of following, by a sort of spectral analysis, the gradual development around the earth of a sort of halo of thinking energy which I have ventured to call the Noosphere. There is no doubt that for such an observer, our planet, having continually gained psychic energy for the last 500 million years, must at this moment be coming to an explosion, which it has never experienced before, of ever-increasing consciousness. For never, most certainly at any moment of the three hundred thousand years of their history, have human atoms been more numerous, or more closely involved with one another, or brought to such a pitch of psychic tension in their totality. Compressed in a murderous body—tension still charged with hatred, alas! But for the distant observer whom we have imagined, these inner frictions and rendings might appear secondary. What he would observe, what he would record in his scientific reports, would be a step forward, a critical step in the foreseen direction of higher states of consciousness and higher unity on the earth’s surface. .
The crisis we are passing through bears the ‘positive sign’. Its characteristics are not those of a break-up, but of a birth. Let us not be frightened, therefore, of what at first sight might look like a final and universal discord. What we are suffering is only the price, the annunciation, the preliminary phase of our humanity.