Table Of Content

About the Author PIERRTEE ILHADER CDH ARD(I1N88 1-1955) was born in France and ordained a Jesuit priest in 191 1. Trained as a paleontologist, Teilhard did research at Muste National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris and fieldwork in China, where in 1929 he codiscovered the celebrated "Peking Man" fossils. In his writings, he sought to reconcile his spiritual and scientific beliefs, producing a vision of man as evolving toward the divine. His unorthodox theological positions were at odds with Catholic doctrine and led to a strained relationship with Jesuit leaders, who forbade him from publishing his writings. The Phenomenon of Man became a bestseller when it was posthumously published in France in 1955. SIRJ ULIAN HUXLEY(1 887-1975) was one of the twentieth century's leading evolutionary biologists. Among his numerous distinctions, Huxlcy was the first director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and cofounder of the World Wildlife Fund. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin THE PHENOMENON OF MAN , ' , . I W I T H AN I N T R O D U C T I O N BY S I R JULIAN H U X L E Y Contents INTRODUCTION BY SIR JULIAN HUXLEY FORBWORD: Seeing BOOK ONE: BEFORE LIFE CAME mapran I. 7%~St u~ojthcU nivmc I. ELEMENTAL MATTER A. Plurality Unity B. c. Energy a. TOTAL MATTER A. The System a. The Totum c. The Quantum 3. THE BVOLUTION OF MATTER A. The Appearance B. The Numerical kws cmrran 11. Tlu Within 4Thinp I. EXISTBNCB 2. THE QUALITATIVE LAWS OF GIOWTH A. Finr ObKNaaon a. Second Observation c. Third Observation 3. SPIRITUAL BNBRCY A. The Problem of the Two Energies a A Line of Solution CONTBNTS CONTBNTS CHAPTEI Ill. Tht hrfhi n it3 &/J' Stage3 CHAPTBR 111. D m t a I. ARIADNE'S THREAD I. THE WITHOUT A. The Crystallisiig World 2. THE RISE OF CONSCIOUSNESS s. The Polymerking World 3. THE APPROACH OF TIME 2. THE WITHIN BOOK THREE: THOUGHT CHAPTER I. Tkc Birth of Thought BOOK TWO: LIFE I. THE THRESHOLD OP REPLBCTION A. The Threshold of the Element: the Hominisa- CHAPTER I. TIlC Advw ojL+ n tion of the Individual I. THE TRANSIT TO LlPE 79 B. T kT hreshold of the Phylum: the Hominisa- A. Micro-orgdmr and Mega-molecules 81 tion of the Speties a. A Forgotten Era 83 c. The Threshold of the Terrestrial Planet: c. The Glluhr Revoluaon 86 The Noosphere 2. THE INITIAL MANIFESTATIONS OF LIPE 2. THE ORIGINAL FORMS A. The Milim CHAPTER 11. Tkc Deployment ofthc Noosphere s. Snullneu and Number c. The Origin of Number I. THE RAMIFYING PHASE OF THE PIE-HOMINIDS D. Inter-relauonship and Shape 2. THE GROUP OF THE NBANDERTHALOIDS 3. THE Homo Sqim COMPLEX 3. TBI SEASON OF LIFE I. THE NEOLITHIC METAMORPHOSIS CHAPTEE 11. Tlv Erponrim, 4L9 5. THE PROLONGATIONS OF THE NEOLITHIC AGB AND THE RISE OF THE WEST I. THE ELEMENTAL MOVEMBNTS OF LIPE A. Reproduction CRAPTER 111. The A.fodmEmtk n. Multiplication I. THE DISCOVERY OP EVOLUTION c. Renovadon A. The Perception of Space-time D. (=onjugaim B. The Envelopment in Duration e hociation c. The Illumination P. Controlled Additnity 2. THE PROBLEM OF ACTION A COIOLLAIY: TRI WAYS 01 Llll A. Modcrn Disquiet a. The Requirements of the Future 2. THE EAYIF1CAtIONS OP THE LIVING MASS A. Aggregates of Growth c. The Dilemma and the Choice 8. -rhc nounrhrag of )ulturicy BOOK FOUR: SURVIVAL c. W' of D i cxzrpran I. TkcCol/ectivcIrcue 3. THE TREE OF Lf?B I. THE CONFLUENCE OF THOUGHT nTheMLinLk3 B. The Dhosionr A. Forced Coalcsumce c The Evidcna 8. Mega-Spth& CONTENTS 2. THB SPIRIT OP THE EARTH A. Mankind a. S a m c. Unanimity TRANSLATOR'S NOTE CHAPTER 11. Beyond the Colkctivc: the Hyper-Personal I. THE CONVERGENCE OP THE PERSON AND Perhaps a word maX be permitted about some of the lesser pro- THE OMEGA POINT blems involved in e translation of this book. A. The Personal Universe The author's style is all his own. In some instances he coins n. The Persodking Universe words to express his thought-' ho-tion', for instance, or ' noos here '--and in others he adapts words to his own ends, as 2. LOVE AS ENERGY whenR trlLt of the ' within ' and the without of things. fi 3. THE ATTRIBUTES OP THE OMEGA POINT meaning, however, should become a1 p arent as his thought un- folds, and I have dispensed with cum rous efforts at defining his CHApran 111. Tkc Ultima~cE mrh terms. As fir as possible I have dispensed with italics for his nco- I. PROGNOSTICS TO BE SET ASIDE logisms-they are repeated too ofttn to stand italicisation in a 2. THE APPROACRBS work alread thickly sprinkled with italics for emphasis. I have A. The O ~ t i oonf R esearch also, in odence to the conventions of typography in England, B. The Dkcovcry of the Humvl Object e b t e d'.t he au't.h or's initial capitals for all abstract nouns such c. The Conjunction of Sacnce and Religion as 'science ' life ' thought ', and also for ' world ', ' universe ', ' man ' and other such key-words of his work. There were dis- 3. m a u rrlMAra advantages in this decision, but at least the printed page lookc more normal to the Y~ srhu der. eplrocua: Thc Chririim, Phmomrnon A number of people ve contributed to the tramlation, some I. AXES OP BBLIBf by subtanad paper work, others by s*~ggestion;s and the out- corn is in a sense a joint effort. Outstanding among partici- 2. EXISTENCE-VALUE pants ue Mr. Geoffrey Sainsbury, Dr. A. Tindell Hopwood, 3. POWER OP GROWTH Profeuor D. M. h4acKinnon and Mr. Noel Lindsay. At times versions or sugB a tions have been conAiaing and I have had to PosTscnrPT: Th~Eucncco/thcPhcnommono jMm take it on myse f to make an editorial decision. The translators' I. A WORLD IN INVOLUTION notes appear in square brackets. I should like to thank my wift, without whom it would have bocn im ossible to produce this 2. THE FIRST APPEARANCE OP MAN version. Finally, I must cake on myse I 'f responsibility for the 3. THE SOCIAL PHENOMENON inadcquaaes that still persist. AppexDIx: Sonc Rcmmh a rk Plvr omd Part cfEvil in a World BERNARD WALL in Evolution Introduction bv Sir lulian Huxlev of The Phenomenon Man is a very remarkable work by a very remarkable human being. Ptre Teilhard dt Chardin was at the same time a Jesuit Father and a distinguished palaeontologist. In of The Phenomenon Man he has effected a threefold synthesis-of the material and physical world with the world of mind and spirit ; of the past with the future ; and of variety with unity, the many with the one. He achieves this by examining every fact and every subject of his investigation sub specie evolutionis, with reference to its development in time and to its evolutionary position. Conversely, he is able to envisage the whole of know- able reality not as a static mechanism but as a proctss. In cotuc- quence, he is driven to search for human sigtllficance in relation to the trends of that enduring and comprehensive process ; the measure of his stature is that he so largely succeeded in the search. I would like to introduce Tk Phommon of Man to English readers by attempting a summary of its general thesis, and of what appear to me to be its more important conclusions. I make no excuse for this personal approach. As I discovered when I hnt met Pere Teilhard in Paris in 1946, he and I were on thc same quest, and had been pursuing parallel roads ever since we were young men in our twenties. Thus, to mention a few signposts which I independently found along my road, already in 1913 1h ad envisaged human evolution and biological evolution as two phases of a single process, but separated by a ' critical point ', after which the properties of the evolving material underwent radical change. This thesis I dcveloped years later in my Uniqueness of Man, adding that man's evolution was unique in showing the dominance of convergence over divergence : in I1 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION the same volume I published an essay on Scientific Humanism (a The different branches of science combhe to demonstrate that close approximation to P2re Teilhard's Neo-Humanism), in which the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic pro- I independently anticipated the title of Phre Teilhard's great book cess, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence by describing humanity as a phenomenon, to be studied and and organisation, which can properly be called a genesis or an analysed by scientific methods. Soon afier the first World War, evolution. For this reason, he uses words like noogenesis, to mean of in Essays a Biologist, I made my fint attempt at defming and the gradual evolution of mind or mental properties, and repeatedly evaluating evolutionary progress. stresses that we should no longer speak of a cosmology but of a In my Romanes Lecture on Evobtionary Ethics, I made an cosmogenesis. Similarly, he likes to use a pregnant term like attempt (which I now set was inadequate, but was at least a hominisation to denote the process by which the original proto- step in the right direction) to relate the development of moral human stock became (and is still becoming) more truly human, codes and religions to the general trends of evolution ; in 1942, the process by which potential man rcalised more and more of his in my Evolution, rkc Modern Synthesis, I estayed the fmt compre- possibilities. Indeed, he extends this evolutionary terminology by hensive post-Mcndelian analysis of biological evolution as a enlploying terms like ultra-horninisation to denote the deducible process : and just before meeting P8re Teilhard had written a future stage of the process in which man will have so fir tran- pamphlet entitled Uncsco : its Purpose and Philosophy, where I scended himself as to demand some new appellation. stressed that such a philosophy must be a global, scientific and With this approach he is rightly and indeed inevitably driven evo~utibnaryh umanism. In this, I was searching to establish an to the conclusion that, since evolutionary phenomena (of course ideological basis for man's further culiural evolution, and to including the phenomenon known as man) are processes, they &fine the position of the individual human personality in the can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or process-a search in which I was later much aided by P&re mainly in terms of their origins : they must be defrned by their Teilhard's writings, and by our conversations and correspondence. direction, their inherent possibilitie; (including of course also The Phenomenon o f Mun is artainly the most important of their limitations), and their deducible future trends. He quotes Ptre Teilhard's published works. Of the rest, some, including with approval Nienxhe's view that man is unfinished and must the essays in La Vision du Pad, reveal earlier developments or be surpassed or completed ; and proceeds to deduce the steps later elaborations of his general thought ; while othm, like needed for his completion. L'Appuritim de f'Hornm, are rather more technical. Pke Teilhard wu keenly aware of the importance of vivid Ptre Tcilhard starts &om the gosition that mankind in its and arresting terminology. Thus in 1925 he coined the term totality is a phenomenon to be ducribcd and analysed like noospkne to denote the sphere of mind, as opposed to, or rather any other phenomenon : it and all its maniktations, induding superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life, and acting as a human history and human values, arc proper objects for scientific transforming agency promoting hominisation (or as I would study. put it, progressive psychosocial evolution). He may perhaps His second and perhaps most hdamental point is the be aiticised for not defining the term more explicitly. By absolute necessity of adopting an evolutionary point of view. noosphc did he intend simply the total pattern of dunking Though for ccrtain'limitd purposes it may be useful to think organisms (i.e. human beings) and their activity, including the of phenomena as isolated statically in the, they arc in point of patterns of their interrelations : or did he intend the special fact never static : they ast always proccaet or parts of processes. environment of man, the systems of org;mued thought and ia 10 13 INTRODUCTION products in which men move and have their being, as fish swim danger that this tendency might destroy the valuable results o and reproduce in rivers and the sea ?* Perhaps it might have cultural diversification, and lead to drab uniformity instead o+ been better to restrict noosphere to the first-named sense, and to to a rich and potent pattern of variety-in-unity. Howevex. use something like noosystem for the second. But certainly perhaps because he was (rightly) so deeply concerned with noo~pkereis a valuable and thought-provoking word. establishing a global unification of human awareness as a necessaq Hc usually uses convergence to denote the tendency of mankind, prerequisite for any real future progress of mankind, and perhap: during its evolution, to superpose cenmpcd on centrifugal also because he was by nature and inclination more interestea trends, so as to prevent centrifugal differentiation fiom leading in rational and scientific thought than in the arts, he did not to fiagnlentation, and eventually to incorporate the results of discuss the evolutionary value of cultural variety in any det;ul, differentiationi n an organised and unified pattern. Human con- but contented himself by maintaining that East and West arc vergence was first manifested on the genetic or biological level : culturally complementary, and that both are needed for the a h r Homo sapienr began to di&rentiate into distinct races (or further synthesis and unification of world thought. subspecies, in more scientific terminology) migration and inter- Before passing to the f di mpliations of human convergence, marriage prevented.t he pioneers from going fwhcr, and led to I must deal with P&re Teillmrd's valuable but rather difficult increasing interbreeding between all human variants. As a result, concept of complexijication. This concept includes, as I under- man is the only successful type which has remained as a single stand it, the genesis of increasingly elaborate organisation during interbreeding group or speaes, and has not radiated out into a cosmogenesis, as manifested in the passage fiom subatomic units number of biologically separated wenlbhga (like the birds, with to atoms, from atoms to inorganic and hter to organic mole- about 8,500 species, or the insects with over half a million). cules, thence to the first subcellular living units or self-replicaang Cultural differentiation set in later, producing a number of assemblages of molecules, and then to cells, to multictllular psychosocial units with different cultures. However, these ' inter- individuals, to cephalised metazoa with brains, to primitive man, thinking groups ', as one writer has called them, are never so and now to civilised societies. sharply separated as are biological s e a ; and with time, the But it involves soniething more. He speaks of complexi- process known to anthropologists as cultural diffurion, Gciliavd fication as an all-pervading tendency, involving the universe in by migration and improved communications, led to an accelmt- dl its parts in an mrouletrrmt organiqw rur soi-mime, or by an ing counter-process of cultural convergence, and so towards the alternative metaphor, as a reploimrmt rur soi-mime. He &us union of the whole human species into a single interthinking envisages the world-stuff as being ' rolled up ' or ' folded in ' group based on a single selfdeveloping fimework of thought upon itself, both locally and in its entirety, and adds that the pro- (or noosystem). ccss is accompanied by an increase of energetic ' tension ' in I . p arenthesis, Phe Teilhd shod himself aware of the the resultant ' corpuscular ' organisaaons, or individualixd con- 1 In Lc P)trinomku Hu& @. aor) he dm to tk noo+ as a new layer structions of increased organisatiod complexity. For want of a or manbranc on the earth's a&, a 't hmlung layer * superposed on th living better English phrase, I shall use convergent integration to define layer of the biosphere uld the lifelas Lyer of inorganic mawrial, the litkospkrc. the operation of this process of sclfcomplexifiution. But in ht arlicr formulation of 1925, in b Virion clw Pacd (p. 92). he calls it Ptre Teilhard also maintains that complcxification by con- ' me 's.p hhe de la dfkxion, de I'invauion comchtc, de I'mion Katie da vergent integration lads to the intensification of mental subjective h a activity-in other words to the evolution of progressively more I4 1s INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION conscious mind. Thus he states that full consciousness (as seen though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation. Indeed an in man) is to be defined as ' the s p d c effect of organised isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as '. complexity But, he continues, comparative study makes it an isolated human individual. I would prefer to say that mind clear that higher animals have minds of a sort, and evolutionary is generated by or in complex organisations of living matter, fact and logic demand that minds should have evolved gradually capable of receiving information of many qdties or modalities as well as bodies and that accordingly mind-like (or ' mentoid ', about events both in the outer world and in itself, of synthesising to employ a barbarous word that I am driven to coin because and processing that information in various organised forms, and of its usefblness) properties must be present throughout the of utilising it to direct present and future action-in other words, universe. Thus, in any case, we must infer the presence of by higher animals with their sense-organs, nerves, brains, and potential mind in all material systems, by backward extra- muscles. Perhaps, indeed, organisations of such complexity can polation from the human phase to the biological, and from the only arise in evolution when their construction enables them to biological to the inorganic. And according to P&re Teilhard, incorporate and interiorise varied external information : cer- we must envisage the intensification of mind, the raising of tainly no non-living, non-sentient organisation has reached mental potential, as being the necessary consequence of com- anything like this degree of elaboration. pledcation, operating by the convergent integration of increas- In human or psychosocial evolution, convergence has cer- ingly complex units of organisation. tainly led to increased complexity. In P&reT eilhard's view, the The sweep of his thought goes even further. He seeks to link increase of human numbers combined with the improvement the evolution of mind with the concept of energy. If I under- of human communications has fused all the para of the noosphere stand him aright, he envisages two forms of energy, or perhaps together, has increased the tension within it, and has caused it two modes in which it is manifested-nergy in the physicists' to become ' infolded ' upon itself, and therefore more highly sense, measurable or calculable by physical methods, and ' psychic organised. In the process of convergence and coalescence, what energy' which increases with the complexity of organised we may metaphorically describe as the psychosocial temperature units.' This view admittedly involves speculation of great intel- rises. Mankind as a whole will accordingly achieve more intense, lectual boldness, but the speculation is extrapolated from a more complex, and more integrated mental activity, which can massive array of fact, and is disciplined by logic. It is, if you guide the human species up the path of progress to higher levels like, visionary : but it is the product of a comprehensive and of horninisation. coherent vision. P&re Teilhard was a strong visualiser. He saw with his It might have been better to say that complexity of a sort mind's eye that ' the banal fact of the earth's roundness '--the is a necessary prerequisite for mental evolution rather than its sphericity of man's environment-was bound to cause this cause. Some biologists, indeed, would claim that mind is intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environ- generated solely by the complexification of certain types of ment, man's thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would organisation, namely brains. However, such logic appears to simply diffuse outwards : it would extend over a greater area, me narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter Sae, c-g.. C. CuQot, Pimc Tcilhord de Chardin, Paris, 1958, p. 430. We 4 y need some new terms in thu field: perhaps ncvmgy and ps+rgy idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic would saw. system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary 16 17