Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

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And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality... the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega... critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
What disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome-a suitable outcome to evolution. Half our present uneasiness would be turned to happiness if we could once make up our minds to accept the facts and place the essence and the measure of our modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We do not get what we call matter as a result of the simple aggregation and juxtaposition of atoms. For that, a mysterious identity must absorb and cement them, an influence at which our mind rebels in bewilderment at first, but which in the end must perforce accept.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others...The universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same act of complete knowledge — the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfill them.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of "complexification."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In one manner or the other, it still remains true that, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
To the cosmic corpuscles we should find it natural to attribute an individual radius of action as limited as their dimensions. We find, on the contrary, that each of them can only be defined by virtue of its influence on all around it. Whatever space we suppose it to be in, each cosmic element radiates in it and entirely fills it. However narrowly the heart of an atom may be circumscribed, its realm is co-extensive, at least potentially, with that of every other atom. This strange property we will come across again, even in the human molecule.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe — even a positivist one — remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by conscious clothes in flesh and bone.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form.... Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth...

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
From an evolutionary point of view, man has stopped moving, if he ever did move.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin