Mankind, in coming of age, has begun to be subject to the necessity and to feel the urgency of forming one single body coextensive with itself.
We shall succeed in counterbalancing the current they represent, and then in reversing it, only by overcoming their religion of force by one that is equally wide in its embrace, equally coherent, and equally attractive. Within us, and directed against them, a dynamism must be at work which is as powerful as that by which they are animated.
The more one considers this infinitely urgent problem of finding an over-all plan for building up the earth, the clearer it becomes that if we are to avoid the road of brute material force, there is no way out ahead except the road of comradeship and brotherhood—and that is as true of nations as it is of individuals: not jealous hostility, but friendly rivalry: not personal feeling, but the team spirit.
Until man, it is true enough that living branches develop primarily by stifling and eliminating one another—the law, in fact, of the jungle. By contrast, starting with man and within the human group, this is no longer true: the play of mutual destruction ceases to operate. Selection, no doubt, is still at work and can still be recognize, but it no longer holds the most important place; and the reason for this is that the appearance of thought has added a new dimension to the universe.
Every blade and every fascicle, every individual and every nation, will find completion through union with all the others. No longer a succession of eliminations, but a confluence of energies—‘synergy’. Such, if we have ears to hear, is the message of biology.
‘Love one another’. This gentle precept, which two thousand years ago came like a soothing oil humbly poured on human suffering, offers itself to our modern spirit as the most powerful, and in fact the only imaginable, principle of the earth’s future equilibrium. Shall we at last make up our minds to admit that it is neither weakness nor harmless fad—but that it points out a formal condition for the achievement of life’s most organic and most technically advanced progress?