Many believers, to avoid the anxieties that contact with reality might renew in them, allow a veil of conventional answers to cover the mysteries of life. And scientists, engrossed in the investigation of detail or caught up by a false materialism, apparently fail to see that by virtue of their discoveries the fundamental question of the future confronts us in all our activities. Stifled by the words they have invented, men are in danger of losing sight of the problem. They have reached the point of no longer grasping the meaning of what their own experiments are discovering.
Up to now, man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature. For some, his ‘spiritual’ value is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history. For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinisms for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences. In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of the universe.
We must accept what science tells us: that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say accept that man was born entirely from the world—not only his flesh and bones, but his incredible power of thought.
Man ‘the thinker’, generally regarded as an ‘irregularity’ in the universe, is precisely one of those special phenomena by which one of the most basic aspects of the cosmos is revealed to us with a degree of intensity that renders it immediately recognizable.
We must make up our minds, by virtue of the general perspectives of evolution themselves, to make a special place in the physics of the universe for the powers of consciousness, spontaneity, and improbability represented by life. This is inevitable, or man remains unexplained—excluded from a cosmos of which he manifestly forms a part.
Life, in fact, is not a partial, limited property of matter, analogous to some vibratory or molecular effect: it is rather a sort of inverse of everything that habitually serves us as a definition of matter. Consequently life is not a fixed and static relationship between elements of the world; it clearly appears, on the contrary, as the sign of a universal process; terrestrial life being a function of the sidereal evolution of the globe, which is itself a function of total cosmic evolution.
Either life, completed by thought, is merely an illusion in the world, or else, once it is granted the least physical reality, it tends to occupy a universal, central, and exigent position in it. This is the true scientific situation.
Once life has encroached so far, only one reality (in so far as it truly exists) remains to confront it, and can be compared to it in size and universality: this is entropy, that mysterious involution by which the world tends progressively to refurl on itself, in unorganized plurality and increasing probability, the layer of cosmic energy. And then, before our enquiring minds, a final duel is fought between life (thought) and entropy (matter) for the domination of the universe. Are life and entropy the two opposite but equivalent faces of a single fundamental reality in eternal equipoise? Or radically has one of them the natural advantage of being more primal and durable than the other?
The cosmos could not possibly be explained as a dust of unconscious elements, on which life, for some incomprehensible reason, burst into flower—as an accident or as a mould. But it is fundamentally and primarily living, and its complete history is ultimately nothing but an immense psychic exercise; the slow but progressive attaining of a diffused consciousness—a gradual escape from the ‘material’ conditions which, secondarily, veil it in an initial state of extreme pluarlity. From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself.
Only this third kind of evolution (expressed both in the concentration of nervous systems and the formation of social groups) can give us the direction and true shape of the movements of life.
After thousands of centuries of effort, life on earth, the child of the cosmos, emerged into thought.
Man (that is to say thinking life) established himself on earth by way of a critical point or area of transformation. Like the apex without magnitude in which the sections of a cone become finally concentrated; like the vapour into which a liquid turns at boiling point without change of temperature, thought succeeds unreflective life by crossing a threshold, by a change of state.
We are confronted with two theoretical possibilities: either from man onwards life comes to an absolute peak and scatters in a plurality of reflective consciousness, each of which is its own final reason; or beyond man (beyond the area of hominization), and despite the decisive and definitive value of ‘personality’, the unity of the evolutionary front remains intact, and the value of the world continues to be built up ahead by a communal effort. Two conceptions of evolution, and therefore two moralities.
To centre, individualize, and personalize oneself is half the joy of life (the other and better half being to decentre oneself in a being greater than oneself).
Man must believe in humanity more than in himself, or else he will lose hope.
On the level of man (or, as one might say, of the noosphere) the progressive advance of earthly life does not fragmentate. Unities of a new kind are formed, to act as more perfect constituents and intended for a superior organization. The general convergence which constitutes universal evolution is not completed by hominization. There are not only minds on the earth. The world continues and there will be a spirit of the earth.
If this picture is not a dream—that is to say, if we twentieth-century humans are indeed, scientifically speaking, nothing but the elements of a soul seeking itself through the cosmos—what is the purpose of our absurd objections, our childish interest? Why do we argue and doze and bore ourselves? Why do we hesitate to open our hearts wide to the call of the world within us, to the sense of the earth?
The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the earth.
Love is the most universal, the most tremendous, and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.
In its most primitive forms, when life was scarcely individualized, love is hard to distinguish from molecular forces.
An unbounded and continuous possibility of contact between minds rather than bodies; the play of countless subtle antennae seeking one another in the light and darkness of the soul; the pull towards mutual sensibility and completion.
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
There is really a spirit of the earth in process of formation.
Instinctively and in principle, man normally keeps his distance from man. But on the other hand, how his powers increase if, in research or competition, he feels the breath of affection or comradeship! What fulfilment when, at certain moments of enthusiasm or danger, he finds himself suddenly admitted to the miracle of a common soul. These pale or brief illuminations should give us a glimmering of the mighty power of joy and action that is still within the human layer.
The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the earth.
The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except the active consciousness of its unity. Life cannot henceforth advance on our planet (and nothing will prevent its advancing—not even its inner servitudes) except by breaking down the partitions which still divide human activity and entrusting itself unhesitatingly to faith in the future.
Let there be no mistake. He who wishes to share in this spirit must die and be reborn, to himself and to others. To reach this higher plane of humanity, he must not only reflect and see a particular situation intellectually, but make a complete change in his fundamental way of valuation and action. In him, a new plane (individual, social, and religious) must eliminate another. This entails inner tortures and persecutions. The earth will only become conscious of itself through the crisis of conversion.
We discover to our surprise a question so vast and concrete confronting us that we cannot understand how the majority of human beings are not more generally impressed by it. How solid in fact are the things we have built? Where is our civilization going? Is not the noosphere implacably condemned from birth to wither and disappear on account of the limited and precarious basis afforded it by our planet? What is the future of the spirit of the earth?
Spirit will always succeed, as it has done till now, in defying risks and determinisms. It is the indestructible part of the universe.
Let us put our trust in spiritual energies. True union does not stifle or confuse its elements; it super-differentiates them in unity. A little more time and the spirit of the earth will emerge from this ordeal with its specific individuality, its own character and features. And then, on the surface of the noosphere, gradually elevated in its preoccupations and passions—always reaching out to solve higher problems and possess greater objects—the striving for being will reach its maximum.
What will happen at the critical period when life on earth becomes mature? Shall we at that moment be capable of joining with other centres of cosmic life to resume the work of universal synthesis on a higher scale? Or shall we, without leaving the earth, penetrate some new surface of ontological distoncinuity—vitalization, hominization, and then a third stage?
Having reached a higher stage in self-mastery, the spirit of the earth is discovering a more and more vital need to worship; from universal evolution God emerges in our minds greater and more necessary than ever.
The birth and progress of the idea of God on earth are intimately bound up with the phenomenon of hominization. At the very moment when life reflects on itself—by virtue of that same movement—it finds itself facing the problem of action. It becomes awake to itself on the ascending and difficult road of progressive unification.
Religion can become an opium. It is too often understood as a simple soothing of our woes. Its true function is to sustain and spur on the progress of life. We are far from wishing to imply that from its beginnings this conviction stood out in the human mind as clearly as it does for us today. But we can recognize now that, underlying much simpler and more childish interpretations, there was really this profound need for an absolute. Beneath all the progressive forms of religion, it is the absolute that was sought.
The more man becomes himself, the more he feels the need to devote himself to one greater than he. Is not this a fact that we can observe all around us? At what moment has there been a more urgent need in the noosphere to find a faith and hope in order to give sense and a soul to the immense organism we are constructing?
God has sometimes seemed to disappear, eclipsed by the organic vastness of the cosmos that was being revealed to us. Once we understand that the universe is supported solely by the future and the spirit, these new immensities cannot fail to reveal to us the majesty, the grandeur, and the overpowering richness of the summit towards which all things converge.
I am thinking of a kind of “Account of the Earth”, in which I shall speak not as a Frenchman, not as a unit in any group, but as a man, simply as a “terrestrian”. I want to express the confidence, desires, and plenitude, also the disappointments, worries, and a kind of vertigo of a man who considers the destinies and interests of the earth (humanity) as a whole.