PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN 2

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, translated from the French by Norman Denny (New York: Image Books/ Doubleday, 1964) (From "The Grand Option": "By virtue of the emergence of Thought a special and novel environment has been evolved among human individuals within which they acquire the faculty of associating together, and acting upon one another, no longer primarily for the preservation and continuance of the species but for the creation of a common consciousness. In such an environment the differentiation born of union may act upon that which is most unique and incommunicable in the individual, namely his personality. Thus socialization, whose hour seems to have sounded for Mankind, does not by any means signify the ending of the Era of the Individual upon earth, but far more its beginning. All that maters at this crucial moment is that the massing together of individualities should not take the form of a functional and enforced mechanization of human energies (the totalitarian principle), but of a 'conspiration' informed with love. Love has always been carefully eliminated from realist and positive concepts of the world; but sooner or later we shall have to acknowledge that it is the fundamental impulse of life, or, if you prefer, the one natural medium in which the rising course of evolution can proceed. With love omitted there is truly nothing ahead of us except the forbidding prospect of standardization and enslavement--the doom of ants and termites. It is through love and within love that we must look for the deepening of our deepest self, in the life-giving coming together of humankind. Love is the free and imaginative outpouring of the spirit over all unexplored paths. It links those who love in bonds that unite but do not confound, causing them to discover in their mutual contact an exaltation capable, incomparably more than any arrogance of solitude, of arousing in the heart of their being all that they possess of uniqueness and creative power." Id. at 28, 45-46. From the "Conclusion": "Forced against one another by the increase in their numbers and the multiplication of their interrelations--compressed together by the activation of a common force and the awareness of a common distress--the men of the future will form, in some way, but one single consciousness; and since, once their initiation is complete they will have gauged the strength of the associated minds, the density of the universe and the narrowness of their prison, this consciousness will be truly adult and of age." Id. at 308, 308-309.).