Like a wave that spreads out, it seemed to me that my vision widened to the dimensions of the earth.
In less than two hundred years we found that what research has done is precisely to engulf everything, like a tide: the thirst for understanding allying itself to the need to produce—man suddenly discovering that he could (or even that he must) assist scientifically in his own person the uninterrupted, though still incomplete, progress of biological evolution.
There is every indication that, following upon a long and slow accumulation of physical and psychic energies in the human atmosphere (the whole of prehistory, and the whole of history), a sort of spiritual tornado has just burst upon us and swept us up.
Let us look once again at the array of devices of all sorts (machines to create or break down matter, machines for seeing, machines for communicating, machines for thinking) whose fantastically variegated fauna is beginning to populate the earth. Can we fail to see that, far from breaking away from one another as autonomous individuals, these incredible creations of man have a natural tendency to come together and interlock in such a way as to combine and multiply their powers?
In us men it is not simply that the tide of life is still rising; it is not simply that it has ceased to divide itself into divergent phyla—but, in addition, concentrated upon itself by its need to know, it has just been carried under the influence of convergence to a paroxysm of its characteristic power of causing a simultaneous and reciprocally effected rise, in the universe, of organization and consciousness, that is to say of interiorizing matter by complexifying it.
Before my bewildered eyes the Berkeley cyclotron had definitely vanished; and in its place my imagination saw the entire noosphere, twisted back upon itself by the wind of research, forming but one single vast cyclone, whose specific effect was to produce, instead of and in place of nuclear energy, psychic energy in a continually more reflective state.