It has been my destiny to stand at a privileged cross-roads in the world; there, in my twofold character of priest and scientist, I have felt passing through me, in particularly exhilarating and varied conditions, the double stream of human and divine forces.
If the universe has hitherto been successful in the unlikely task of bringing human thought to birth in what seems to us an unimaginable tangle of chances and mishaps, it means that it is fundamentally directed by a power that is eminently in control of the elements that make up the universe.
I love the universe that surrounds me too dearly not to have confidence in it.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred never explicitly ask themselves the question, ‘Is life worth living?’ They fail to see the problem, because life is still carrying them along automatically.
I would be psychologically incapable of making the least effort if I were unable to believe in the absolute value of something in that effort. Prove to me that one day nothing will remain of my work, because there will be not only a death of the individual and a death of the earth, but a death, too, of the universe—prove that, and you break the mainspring of all my activity.
Free will can be put into motion, in the smallest matter, only by the appeal of a definitive result, of a ‘Ktema eis aei’—an everlasting possession—promised to its effort.
The One appears to us only in the wake of the Multiple, dominating the Multiple, since its essential and formal act is to unite.
Matter and Spirit are not opposed as two separate things, as two natures, but as two directions of evolution within the world.
In itself, death is a failure and a stumbling-block. It is the blind revenge taken by the insufficiently mastered elements on the soul that hampers their autonomy.
The initial impulse that sets the Multiple in motion towards unity, the energy at the source that animates the whole sequence of cosmic unification and spiritualisation, is the magnetic force of omega. Without that gratuitous appetite for Being, without that prevenient zest for union, the mechanism of the universe would remain immobile, the elements of the world would never emerge from their infinitely tenuous plurality.
The man who acts in a religious spirit ends by almost entirely dismissing himself from his mind. He soon comes to see himself as no more than a sort of conscious atom dedicated to a great task.
The mystical Milieu gathers up everything that is made up of energy. Nothing in the world is completely lacking in power, and nothing is rejected, except that which turns its back upon the unification of spirit.
Evolution seems to have reached a point at which its progress is made no longer in the individual human body (for this has reached maturity) but in the human soul, and still more, maybe, in the collectivity of human souls.
The unification that is being developed so intensely in our time in the human spirit and the human collectivity is the authentic continuation of the biological process that produced the human brain.
Sooner or later, society will become organised. The easily won novelties of the Earth will be exhausted. Men will then become more distinctly aware of the essential need of knowledge if they are to have fuller being; they will find themselves faced with vaster and more urgent problems, expressed in clearer terms; and then they will at last associate in a common quest, as eagerly as they are now doing to pile up money and slaughter one another.
Intellectual research will no longer be a diversion for the dilettante, something for which the amateur has a taste. It will have taken on the dignity of a primal collective function. When mankind has become conscious of its isolation in the cosmos, and is threatened by collective dangers, it will have to discover or die.
The men of the future will form, in some way, but one single consciousness; and since, once their initiation is complete, they will have gauged the strength of their associated minds, the immensity of the universe, and the straitness of their prison, this consciousness will be truly adult of age.