Part II. On the Possible Bases of a Universal Human Creed
Chapter 7: A Great Event
2. The One Possible Interpretation: A Super-organization of the Matter around Us
phenomenon, we do better to accept it frankly. Let us look it in the face and see whether, using it as an unassailable foundation, we cannot erect upon it a hopeful edifice of joy and liberation.
2. The One Possible Interpretation: A Super-organization of the
to all the corpuscles constituting the Universe, but varying in proportion to the complexity of any particular molecule: which amounts to saying that the degree of psychism, the ‘within’, of the different elements
composing the world will be small or great, according to the place of the element in the astronomically extended scale of complexities at present known to us.
The effect of this double modification is to transform our perception of things. Hitherto, in the eyes of a Science too much accustomed to reconstruct the world on one spatial axis extending in a line from the infinitely small to the infinitely great, the larger molecules of organic chemistry, and still more the living cellular composites, have existed without any defined position, like wandering stars, in the general scheme of cosmic elements. Now however, simply by the introduction of another dimension, a new order and definition become apparent.
Traversing the rising axis from the infinitesimal to the immense another branch appears, rising through Time from the infinitely simple to the supremely complicated. It is on this branch that the consciousness- phenomenon has its place and eventually shows itself. There is first a long, obscure stretch which seems dead but is in fact ‘imperceptibly alive’. Then, at the stage of corpuscles reaching a million atoms in their complexity (viruses), we come to the first flush heralding the dawn of Life. Later, after the cell, there is a definite radiation growing richer and more intense with the formation and gradual concentration of nervous systems. And finally, at the extreme end of the known spectrum, comes the thinking incandescence of the human brain.
By this re-ordering of things, not only does Life, despite its extreme rarity and localization in Space, show itself, in symmetry with atomic disintegration, to be a fundamental universal current (the current); not only does Man, with his billions of interacting nervous cells, find a natural, cosmically enrooted place in this generalized physical scheme;
but something begins to take shape ahead of Man. Once again we find ourselves confronted by the forces of collectivization.
Owing to an inhibition, inherent in our mentality, which prevents us from looking squarely at collectivity, ‘commonsense’ has long refused to accept any but superficial analogies between the ‘moral or artificial’
sphere of human institutions and the ‘physical’ sphere of organized Nature. Indeed, it is only very recently, and as yet timidly, that
sociology has ventured to set up the first bridges between biology and itself. But once we have accepted the general Law of Recurrence linking
the growth of consciousness to the advance of complexity within a
process of universal evolution, nothing can arrest the logical sequence in which two worlds which we were accustomed to regard as being
completely separate are seen to approach and complement each other.
We see Nature combining molecules and cells in the living body to construct separate individuals, and the same Nature, stubbornly pursuing the same course but on a higher level, combining individuals in social organisms to obtain a higher order of psychic results. The processes of chemistry and biology are continued without a break in the social sphere. This accounts for the tendency, which has been insufficiently noted, of every living phylum (insect and vertebrate) to group itself towards its latter end in socialized communities. Above all, in the case of Man (the only living species in which the variety, quality and
intensity of individual relationships enables the phenomenon to achieve its full extent) it explains the rapid psychic rise accompanying
socialization, which takes the following forms:
a the growth of a collective memory in which a common inheritance of Mankind is amassed in the form of accumulated experience and passed on through education;
b the development, through the increasingly rapid transmission of thought, of what is in effect a generalized nervous system, emanating from certain defined centers and covering the entire surface of the globe;
c the growth, though the interaction and ever-increasing concentration of individual viewpoints, of a faculty of common vision penetrating beyond the continuous and static world of popular conception into a fantastic but still manageable world of atomized energy.
All round us, tangibly and materially, the thinking envelope of the Earth -- the Noosphere -- is adding to its internal fibers and tightening its network; and at the same time its internal temperature is rising, and with this its psychic potential. These two associated portents allow of no misunderstanding. What is really going on, under cover and in the form of human collectivization, is the super-organization of Matter upon itself, which as it continues to advance produces its habitual, specific effect, the further liberation of consciousness. It is all one and the same process. And, by very reason of the elements involved, the process cannot achieve stability until, over the entire globe, the human quantum has not merely closed the circle upon itself (as it is doing at this
moment, in a penultimate phase) but has become organically totalized.
So what finally lies ahead of us is a planetary arrangement of human mass and energy, coinciding with a maximal radiation of thought -- at once the external and internal ‘planetization’ of Mankind. That is what we are inexorably headed for, in the tightening embrace of the social determinisms. The Earth could more easily evade the pressures which cause it to contract upon itself, the stars more readily escape from the spatial curve which holds them on their courses, than we men can resist the cosmic forces of a converging universe!
And why should we seek to resist these unifying forces which are essentially benevolent? Is it because we are afraid that in the process of super-creation they will render us less human?
The basic characteristic of Man, the root of all his perfections, is his gift of awareness in the second degree. Man not only knows; he knows that he knows. He reflects. But this power of reflection, when restricted to the individual, is only partial and rudimentary. As Nietzsche has rightly observed, although he put the wrong construction on it, the individual, faced by himself alone, cannot fulfill himself. It is only when opposed to other men that he can discover his own depth and wholeness. However personal and incommunicable it may be at its root and origin, Reflection can only be developed in communion with others. It is essentially a social phenomenon. What can this mean except that its eventual
completion and wholeness must exactly coincide (in full accord with the Law of Complexity) with what we have called the planetization of
Mankind?
Some hundreds of thousands of years ago Consciousness achieved the stage of its own centration, and thus the power of thought, in a brain that had reached the limit of nervous complication: this was the first stage in the hominization of Life on earth.
In due course, after the passage of further thousands or even millions of years, it can, and it must, super-centrate itself in the bosom of a
Mankind totally reflexive upon itself.
Instead of vainly opposing or meekly submitting to the creative forces of the planet which bears us, should we not rather let our lives be illumined and broadened in the growing light of this second stage of hominization?
3. The Only Permissible Inward Reaction: A Sense of Evolution