In the number of people employed, in the amount of money devoted to it, in the quantity of energy used, research is coming more and more to be the thing that really matters in the world. From being a private indulgence and a diversion it has already attained the rank and dignity of a vital human function—as vital, undoubtedly, as nutrition and reproduction.
We must make up our minds to accept, under the pressure of facts, that man is not yet complete in Nature, that he is not yet fully created—but that, in and around us, he is still in the full swing of evolution.
The human group, considered in its collective totality, is tending more and more distinctly to integrate itself organically in a super-reflective whole.
The human mind is showing itself capable of discovering and controlling the material sources of energy that in all probability will enable it (by direct action on the laws of reproduction, heredity, and morphogenesis) to stimulate and influence at will—within certain limits we cannot yet foresee—the transformation of its own organism (including the brain…).
Research is the actual expression (at the reflective stage) of this evolutionary effort—an effort not simply to continue to exist, but to exist more fully; not simply to survive but irreversibly to ‘super-live’.
In the Nature that surrounds us, research is the form in which the creative power of God is hidden and operates the most intensely.
Faith in God, and faith in man or in the world. The whole progress of the Kingdom of God, I am convinced, is today tied up with the problem of reconciling (not superficially but organically) these two currents.
The Kingdom of Christ, to which our allegiance is sworn, cannot be established, either in battle or in peace, except upon an earth that has been taken, along all the roads of technology and thought, to the extreme limit of its humanisation.