THE EVOLUTION OF THE PERSONAL
by Brian Cowan INTRODUCTION
In a 1944 essay of his entitled 'Centrology, An Essay in a Dialectic of Union' Teilhard makes what at first sight may seem like a surprising claim. He states that 'in its most intimate essence, the nature of cosmic evolution' consists of 'a cosmic process of personalization.' (1) I take him to mean here that evolution, cosmogenesis, of its very nature, is a process that develops in such a fashion as to produce personality as its end product.
In this submission I would like to explore why the French Jesuit thinks that cosmogenesis is, in its essence, a process that involves personalization. What is his reason for arguing, as he does, that '*the personal ... is continually on the upgrade in the universe*'? (2) On what grounds does he envisage our cosmos as 'a universe in process of psychic concentration' and so '*identical* with a universe that is acquiring a personality'? (3)
PERSONALITY, AN ADVANCED FORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
It is worthwhile noting that Teilhard pretty well equates what he calls "centrogenesis" with"personalization". Thus he talks about 'centrogenesis' as involving the 'convergence of the universe along its axis of centrocomplexity or personalization'. (4) As he uses the terms, a centred entity is a personal entity. Further, from his perspective, the evolutionary ascent to centricity or personality is ineluctably intertwined with the progress of union (or convergence) and complexification (or organization). Thus does he tell us that 'union personalizes' (5) and that 'the centricity (the consciousness) of a being increases with its complexity' (6).
The following passage indicates that, for Père Teilhard, evolution's progress toward centricity is also to be identified with that same evolution's advancement in the direction of what he calls interiority, consciousness and soul. He writes: ' ... the most essential, the most significant, characteristic of any of the units whose association makes up the universe, is distinguished in those units by a certain degree of interiority -- that is to say by centricity (soul), which is itself a function of a certain degree of complexity (*body*, and, more particularly, brain). This *coefficient of centro-complexity* (or, which comes to the same thing, of consciousness) is the true absolute measure of being in the beings that surround us. That, and that alone, can be the basis for a truly natural classification of the elements of the universe.' (7)
What is also being asserted, I believe, in the above quote, is the notion that the more complex and aware an entity is, the higher does that entity rank on an evolutionary scale of being. Such a notion seems to me to tie in nicely with the French Jesuit's claim that '*to be more is in the first place to know more*.' (8) Few of us would wish to deny that it is we human persons who are the most knowledgeable of the beings here on planet Earth. Such being the case, if we accept the Jesuit thinker's system of natural classification, we are led to the point of seeing human beings as the leading shoot of terrestrial evolution.
What Teilhard seems to be saying is that personality, centricity, interiority, sophisticated consciousness, advanced awareness or soul emerges, out of cosmic matter as a function of the material complexification or organization of that matter. Sometimes, too, the Auvergnian Jesuit uses the term "spirit" in a sense approximately synonymous with terms like "personality", "centricity", "mind" and "soul". Just such a usage of the word "spirit" occurs, I believe, in the following passage:
'What is finally the most revolutionary and fruitful aspect of our present age is the relationship it has brought to light between matter and spirit: spirit being no longer independent of matter, or in opposition to it, but laboriously emerging from it under the attraction of God by way of synthesis and centration.' (9)Here we have presented to us, if I have understood Teilhard correctly, the notion of spirit, or mind, or soul or personality emerging out of matter under the pull or influence of a force of attraction to the Divine. Further, as the Jesuit thinker sees it, this emergence of spirit from matter also arises as a function of the matter in question being involved, with respect to itself, in a process of synthesis and centration, that is to say a process of complexification and organization.
With the foregoing considerations in mind, we can legitimately say, I believe, that, for Teilhard, the emergence of personality, in the course of cosmogenesis, is to be equated with the emergence of that advanced form of awareness to which he accords such appellations as spirit, mind, thought, reflective consciousness. Personality, in other words, is simply an advanced and sophisticated form of consciousness. Further, from the Teilhardian perspective, the appearance, on our planet, of many mindful beings capable of sophisticated communication with one another (by way of invented symbolic languages and invented symbolic writing systems, for example), has, in some sense, impelled the multitude of minds to converge in the direction of a single mind, a single noosphere, a single planetary envelope. The Jesuit paleontologist expresses a point of view which looks favourably on the emergence of a sort of unified global mind, when he writes:
'It may well be that in its individual capacities and penetration our brain has reached its organic limits. But the movement does not stop there. From west to east, evolution is henceforth occupied elsewhere, in a richer and more complex domain, constructing with all minds joined together, *mind*. Beyond all nations and races, the inevitable concretion into one block of mankind has already begun.' (10)
THE UNIQUENESS TO THINKING, PERSONAL LIFE The notion of an interlinked noosphere having a un i-conscious global mind, seems, in Teilhard's view, to represent an evolutionary feature unique to thinking, personal life, on our planet. He brings the idea of such a uniqueness to the fore in the following passage taken from a 1947 essay of his. He writes:
'Until the coming of man the branches or shoots composing the different living species tended inexorably to diverge and spread ever more widely apart as they developed. With man, on the other hand, owing to the grand psychological phenomenon of reflection, the branches of his species follow an entirely different course. Instead of separating and detaching themselves from one another they turn inwards and presentlyintertwine, so that by degrees, races, peoples, nations merging together, they come to form a sort of uni-conscious super-organism. To eyes that can see,this is what is now happening.' (11)From the perspective of the French Jesuit, mind to mind convergence,subsequent to the recent dawn of terrestrial reflection, has resulted in a 'profound change in the evolutionary process at the human level'. (12) And the change in question is, of course, one which is unifying many minds into a kind of single mind coextensive with the totality of humanity on planet Earth.
AN EXPONENTIAL SURGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS The explosion of thinking life out of instinctual life, around the end of the Pliocene epoch, represents, for Teilhard, an exponential surge forward in the powers of terrestrial consciousness, a surge involving what he calls a "squaring of consciousness". Further, in his view, this exponential increase in awareness constituted the principle attribute of a "new kind of life", a "second form of life" which burst into existence, for the very first time, on our globe. From the perspective of the Jesuit paleontologist, as the Tertiary period and the Pliocene epoch were simultaneously winding down to their close (13), within the pongid (or anthropoid ape) population, the first 'neuropsychical "mutation'" (14) in a long series of such mutations occurred. As the Jesuit paleontologist sees it, what is remarkable, though, about the first neuropsychical mutation is that from it 'the first thinking animal on earth sprang towards the end of the Tertiary'. (15)
It was Teilhard's opinion that this first thinking animal, this first primitive human being appeared on our planet less than a million years ago. Thus does he write in 1954:
'It is certainly not more than a million years since man appeared isolated and unarmed, in one corner of the earth.' (16)Today's paleontologists, of course, have pushed back the dating of the earliest human species (Homo habilis, perhaps) to somewhat more than two million years ago.
Referring to humankind's appearance on earth, Teilhard writes:
, ... the truth ... is that some hundreds of thousands of years ago, with man's appearance among the "pongids" an event occurred on earth comparable only to that of the emergence of the first "living" molecules, two or three billion years ago, among the "dead" proteins. With the "squaring of consciousness", nothing less than a new kind of life (a second form of life) began its special evolution in the Pliocene on our planet'. (17)
NEW POWERS OF AWARENESS AFOOT UPON THE EARTH What, we may ask, were the new powers of awareness that surged up onto the evolutionary scene and exponentially increased terrestrial consciousness as the Tertiary period was drawing to its close? What type of awareness was it that burst into being and effectuated the kind of squaring of consciousness by which 'instinct... succeeded in raising itself to the "second power"'? (18) I believe that Teilhard offers us his answer to these questions in his chapter on 'The Birth of Thought' in 'The Phenomenon of Man'. Thus, with reference to the transformation of some part of instinct into thought or reflection, he writes:
, ... the consequences of such a transformation are immense, visible as clearly in nature as any of the facts recorded by physics or astronomy. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice, and invention, mathematics, art, calculations of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love -- all these activities of *inner life* are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly formed centre as it explodes onto itself.' (19)As we have already observed, when Teilhard speaks of "a centre" he often means "a person". And to reinforce our earlier observations we can note that he quite clearly refers to 'man' as 'a centred, that is, a personal being'. (20) Given the Jesuit thinker's tendency to use the word "centre" as the equivalent to "person", I am of the view that, in the above passage, taken from 'The Phenomenon of Man', when he mentions "the newly formed centre" he, in effect, means "the newly formed person". The same passage spells out for us the novel psychic powers, the novel powers of awareness ushered into the world by these newly emerged centres or persons. These novel psychic abilities are the following ones..
- The power of thinking consciousness to double back upon itself so that the said consciousness not only knows but knows that it knows.- The power to engage in abstract, logical, mathematical thought.
- The power of reasoned choice, the ability to freely give or withhold consent.
- The power of invention in many domains: theological, philosophical, technological, artistic, etc.
- The power to experience sufficient foreknowledge to permit fairly sophisticated calculations related to future events, and plan for, worry about, and dream of such events.
Teilhard would readily agree, to be sure, that the first neurological mutation, from which emerged the first thinking animal on earth, was followed by many subsequent mutations, neurological and otherwise. Further, he would concur that these later mutations, under the governance of natural selection, had the effect of improving (or complexifying) the brain of the earliest hominians all the way up to that marvel of organic intricacy, the brain of Homo sapiens. And as we know, the brain of Homo sapiens is capable of subtending highly creative and sophisticated systems of thought.
THE DIRECTION IS NOT ALWAYS STRAIGHT AHEAD Of course, the evolutionary journey to centredness, to personhood, like any other evolutionary journey, does not always move directly ahead. It can, to some degree, go into reverse mode and fall back, some distance, in the direction of the impersonal. From Teilhard's perspective, when such a reversal occurs, human communities can acquire some resemblance to 'insect colonies, which are lower and rudimentary forms of human society' (21), lower and rudimentary, I think he is saying, because totally lacking in reflective consciousness. It does seem to me that there is some merit in what the Auvergnian Jesuit is suggesting here. When I view film footage of the armed forces of totalitarian regimes marching along in mechanical and regimented lockstep, I cannot help but be reminded of the operations mindlessly and mechanistically carried out by the arthropod denizens of the ant-hill or the termite colony. There seems to be more personality associated with an army marching, in review, through the main square of the capital city of a totalitarian state than in the automaton-like busy-ness that one perceives in the hive or the termitary.
As Teilhard de Chardin saw it, the 'totalitarian experiments' of his day constituted a 'clumsy and incomplete way' of moving toward human convergence and union; for him, the totalitarian way was one which tended 'dangerously towards the sub-human state of the ant-hill or the termitary'. (22) In his view there is a shadow side to authentic human convergence, a side that consists in a tendency to undertake 'the transformation of the individual into a standardized part.' (23) Few of us, I believe, will wish to contest the notion that for an autonomous individual to regress to the level of standardized part constitutes a definite fall back from personhood.
TURNING TO THE FUTURE So far, in this submission, our gaze has been turned largely to the past as that past has worked its way up to the present time. If we find ourselves concurring, on the whole, with Teilhard's vision of what has occurred during the bygone times of terrestrial evolution then we may well agree with him when he makes the claim that 'by the capital event of *hominization*, the most advanced portion of the cosmos has become *personalized*.' (24) But what of the future? The Jesuit thinker makes it quite clear to us that, in his view, the process of personalization will continue under the influence of the Omega Point, who is "the final divine term" of evolution and who is also a Person. Thus does Pere Teilhard write:
, ... since everything *in the universe beyond man* takes place within *personalized being*, the final divine term of universal convergence must also (eminently) possess the quality of a Person (without which it would be inferior to the elements it governs).' (25)As Teilhard sees it, the Omega Point, the Divinity, God, constitutes a transcendent, eternal Person. Needless to say, as eternal, the divine Person does not emerge out of matter as do human persons in the course of evolution. Further, as a believing, trinitarian Christian, the Auvergnian Jesuit would need, I think, to qualify his usage of the word "Person", in the foregoing quote, so that the said usage takes into account the three Persons of the Trinity. In any event, from Teilhard's perspective, it is the divine, personal Omega point who draws all other persons to the divine Centre of evolutionary convergence. I believe this notion is apparent in the two passages which follow.
'By its structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only be a *distinct Centre radiating at the core of a system of centres*; a grouping in which personalization of the all and personalization of the elements reach their maximum simultaneously and without merging, under the influence of a supremely autonomous focus of union.' (26)And, in a second passage consisting of a footnote, he goes on to add:
'It is for this central focus, necessarily autonomous, that we shall henceforward reserve the expression "Omega Point". (27)
TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE BRAIN AND A GLOBAL MIND As . he casts his phenomenological gaze back upon the history of humanity over the past several hundred thousand years, Teilhard de Chardin believes that he sees evidence of the gradual emergence of a collective human brain and a global human mind. To be sure, this brain and this mind, from his perspective, are as yet in their early stages of development and may well be destined to undergo much further growth over an interval of some millions of years. Looking to the durations of development which likely lie ahead for humankind, he writes:
'Now that our planet has reached its present level, no physical or psychic force seems capable of preventing man, for millions of years still, from seeking, inventing and creating in every direction.' (28)
Let's proceed to take a closer look at what the Jesuit scientist regards as the interrelated phenomena of an emergent collective brain and an emergent global mind.
In Teilhard's opinion, the history of consciousness, since the commencement of hominization (that is say the since the dawn human life upon our globe), discloses a growing number of brain-to-brain links, links which tend to draw human brains together, to unify them. Among the links in question are such inventions as symbolic language, notational writing and the printing press with its facility for "mass-producing" such writing. And within very recent times human beings have invented that
'extraordinary network of radio and television communications which, perhaps anticipating the direct syntonization of brains through the mysterious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of "etherized" universal consciousness,' (29)To Teilhard's mention of radio and television, we might also wish to add a reference to the telephone and the internet. Proceeding, perhaps, into a more speculative domain (and as the foregoing quote hints at), the Jesuit thinker does not rule out the possible future growth of human-to-human telepathic abilities. In this connection he is open to the idea that 'the phenomenon of telepathy, still sporadic and haphazard', might, one day, become 'both general and normal'. (30)
Contemplating what he regarded as an ever growing cerebral unification at the level of thinking life, on our planet, Teilhard was led to the view that 'humanity ... is building its composite brain beneath our eyes.' (31) In this same connection, he also speaks of a 'brain of brains' and of a 'collective brain' being in process of development vis-a-vis humankind. (32) Very interestingly, the Auvergnian Jesuit sees a distinct similarity between the human social groupings (which are steps along the way to the development of humankind's common or collective brain) and the biological groupings of single cells into metazoa. Thus does he write that
'it would be ... mistaken and unproductive not to recognize in social groupings the "hominized" extension of the same mechanisms as that which produced the metazoa from isolated cells.' (33)As T eilhard sees it, in the coming together of humans to form a collective brain there is sort of repetition, with enhancements, of the process of by which single-celled creatures came together, long ago, to form the first multi-cellular organism. Such a repetition or recurrence, with enhancements, as the one under discussion, constitutes, for the Jesuit scientist, an exemplification of what he calls 'the general law of recurrence' (34), a law or pattern which, in his opinion, pervades the entire history of evolution.
Now if we are prepared to talk about a collective or common brain, within the human zoological group, are we, thereby, constrained to also speak of a collective or global mind subtended by such a brain? Teilhard de Chardin certainly thinks along these lines, and he does not hesitate to say so. For example, earlier, in this submission, we noted that, in his opinion, 'evolution is ... constructing, with all minds joined together, *mind*.' (35) And, elsewhere, he goes so far as to say, in effect, that all of humankind is becoming one person. Thus does he write:
'for men upon earth, all the earth, to learn to love one another, it is not enough that they should know themselves to be members of one and the same *thing*; in "planetizing" themselves they must acquire the consciousness, without losing themselves, of becoming one and the same *person*.' (36)And, writing in 1950, he mentions, using poetic language, the transformation of matter into spirit and personality. In this regard, we read of
'crimson gleams of matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a universe that is person'. (37)
OTHER PERSONALIZED PLANETS Is our planet the only one associated with the evolution of the personal? Not in Teilhard's opinion. As he sees it,
'there is no proof ... that in conformity still with some law of large numbers many obscure stars, many earths besides our own, may not already be scattered, or may not still be expected, among the galaxies.' (38)He goes on to remark that, from his perspective, the many earths theory constitutes an 'hypothesis which has positive likelihood on its side'. (39) Further, in his view, if the hypothesis of a scattering, within the galaxies, of many worlds similar to planet Earth, turns out to be true, then personalization, the process of centro-complexification, is not unique to our planet but rather constitutes a reality that is pan-cosmic in its scope. In this connection, he writes:
'With centro-complexity dealing not simply, now, with grains of thought upon a single planet but with as many noospheres as there will be thinking planets in the firmament, the process of personalization takes on a decisively cosmic aspect.' (40)
THE IRREVERSIBILITY OF THE PERSONAL An important aspect of personality or mind or spirit, from Teilhard's standpoint, is its irreversibility or immortality. Thus does he write:
'From the moment when evolution begins to *think itself* it can no longer live with or further itself except by knowing itself to be irreversible -- that is to say, immortal. For what point can their be in living with eyes fixed constantly and laboriously upon the future, if this future, even though it take the form of a noosphere, must finally become a zero? Better surely to give up and die at once.' (41)In the estimation of the French Jesuit, without the expectation of irreversibility or immortality, thinking life, once it becomes sufficiently aware, will see no point in dedicating itself to the hard work of assisting evolution along its route into the future if the destination of that route is seen to consist of a total zero involving the complete annihilation of the personal.
Teilhard is also at pains to stress that, as he sees it, an impersonal irreversibility or immortality is no more a viable option than is that of total annihilation. Thus does he tell us that
'a world presumed to be heading towards the impersonal (the word being interpreted in its normal sense of "infrapersonal") becomes both unthinkable and unliveable.' (42)From his perspective, for the personal to find itself being reversed back down into the infrapersonal is as much a form of death as for it to find itself collapsing into total not-being. In either case, personality perishes. In his opinion, evolution, at its advanced, personalized stages, is not destined to go into full reverse mode and descend to the sub-personal. No, from his perspective, evolution involves 'an *irreversible* rise towards the *personal*.' (43)
So, for the Auvergnian Jesuit, there needs to be the irreversible survival, beyond bodily death, of some phase of the person. It is his view that thinking (or personal) life continues beyond bodily, planetary and cosmic death and consists in some form of life that involves thinking without a brain, in a realm which transcends time and space. This realm is, of course, that of 'Omega' which transcends the serial domain, which exists and lives '*outside all series*', including the space-time series. (44) With reference to the evolutionary process of hominization (or personalization), Teilhard writes:
'... hominization cannot physically continue for very much longer without explicitly postulating the existence ahead of a *critical point of super -reflection*: something like an emergence of co-reflection from time and space into a definitely irreversibilized life.' (45)By the term "co-reflection", I understand the Jesuit thinker to mean the cooperative reflection of many minds operating more or less as a single collective mind.
As Teilhard sees it, corporeal death, whether it involves an individual, a noosphere or a cosmos, signals the end of a partnership between material complexity and spiritual consciousness, but it certainly does not herald the cessation of spiritual consciousness, that is to say of personality. In this connection, he mentions what he views as 'the ultimate break-up of the partnership complexity/consciousness', a break-up that is able
'to release, in the free state, a thinking withoutbrain.' (46)Such a release, in his view, constitutes 'the escape of some part of the Weltstoff [i. e. "the world-stuff"] from entropy'. (47)
To be sure, the Jesuit thinker is well aware that not a few persons, including many in the scientific community, will turn a sceptical eye in the direction of his theory of personal irreversibility. In this regard, he remarks:
'All this, in the eyes of science today, seems impossible to accept. But, on the other hand, how can we deny the possibility that it is true without at the same time stopping the ascending movement of the entire world (by disactivation, I repeat) in its human leading shoot?' (48)By "disactivation" here Teilhard is, of course, referring to a deactivation in human energy involving humankind's loss of the enthusiasm and motivation that are needed to continue the hard work of advancing evolution. In his opinion, such a deactivation is inevitable if people come to perceive their toilsome efforts, on behalf of evolution, as doing no more than furthering a cause that is ultimately going nowhere except to a final zero, to an end-point of total annihilation. In bringing this submission to its close, I would like to try to sum up what I believe are the main points raised in this presentation regarding Teilhard's theory of the emergence and the growth of the personal in evolution. The points in question seem to me to be the following ones.
- Evolution has, since its inception, been moving in the direction of personality.- The orientation of the evolving cosmos is centrogenetic, polarized toward organized convergence and complexified union, a convergence and a union which personalize.
- The more entities self-organize and self-complexity themselves, the more do such entities become conscious. Terrestrial consciousness is a function of material complexity; as complexity advances and becomes more intricate, so does consciousness advance and become more sophisticated.
- As complexity/consciousness advances, it eventually reaches a critical point at which, subtended by a neurological mutation, some part of instinctual awareness morphs into a rudimentary reflective consciousness, into the first glimmerings of thought.
- Further neurological and other mutations, under the governance of natural selection, through the course of hundreds of thousands of years, underlie a growing facility for thought. The thought processes of the earliest humans were, no doubt, so elementary as to be scarcely distinguishable from instinctive cognition. No one is likely to deny that the advanced and sophisticated thinking abilities of today's Homo sapiens is, far and away, superior to the primitive and backward cognitional skills of the very ancient species of humankind.
- Human beings, the grains of thinking life which populate our planet, are highly unified centres, that is to say, persons.
- These human centres or persons are capable of self-consciousness, abstract thought, free choice, invention, fore-knowledge and fore-planning.
- Further, these personal centres tend towards a kind of mental unity among themselves, that is to say a unity held together by linkages involving shared ideas.
- There can be partial and temporary fall-backs from gains made toward personalization as when totalitarian political regimes regress backwards to the lockstep regimentation and mechanization of such insect societies as those composed of ants or termites.
- The personalization of the past will continue into the future under the pull of a divine Centre of attraction and convergence which Teilhard calls the Omega Point. This Omega Point is a Person, an eternal Super-Person who transcends motion, time, space and evolution.
- Due to humanity's ever increasing brain-to-brain links (language, writing, telecommunications, etc.) a common or collective human brain is in the process of constructing itself, a brain that is destined to subtend, more and more, a global mind, a global personality.
- Very likely Earth is not the only planet to be engaged in a process of personalization; many other planets, in the universe, probably find themselves under the governance of a personalizing destiny similar to the one realizing itself on our globe.
- The personal can never irrevocably reverse itself into the impersonal; personality, once attained is irreversible, immortal, able to survive, bodily, planetary and cosmic death.
CONCLUDING REMARKS I tend to concur with a good deal of what Teilhard is saying. It does, indeed, seem to be the case that evolution is a self-complexifying process. Further we would be hard pressed to deny, I think, that, here on planet Earth, at a certain critical point during (and as a function of) the said process, vitalization, with its attendant consciousness, emerged onto the evolutionary scene. This critical point of vitalization may well have occurred on the occasion of the appearance of the first eubiont or proto-cell in the "primordial soup" of one of our planet's ancient seas. The evolutionary journey from the eubiont, by way of the cell and the metazoan, to the first thinking (or personal) animal involved a peregrination lasting at least 3,500 million years. And during those thousands of millions of years, material complexification continued until it eventuated, perhaps a little more than two million years ago, in the human brain which proved capable of subtending thought and personality.
I am also open to the Jesuit thinker's idea that the personalization process, despite the many setbacks it has suffered, particularly during the last century, is still in operation and advancing. Nor do I discount his notion that personality is irreversible because it has to be if evolution, at the thinking level of life, is to continue for very much longer.
In my presentation of the Jesuit thinker's views on the evolution of the personal, I have not, in any significant way, brought to the fore aspects of his Christian faith. He would claim, and I do not disagree, that the said faith accords well with his theory of personalization. But my reason for largely leaving out references to his Christianity is that I think his theory can stand in its own merits without reference to the Christian religion. And this ability of his theory to stand on its own merits (assuming I am right in thinking that it can) may be helpful to non-Christians who find it gratifying to see points of view held up or supported by extra-Christian underpinnings
Brian Cowan, February, 2004.
Notes: (1) 'Centrologyet. aL', in 'Activation of Energy' (Harvest Book, 1970), p. 117.
(2) 'Centrologyet. al.', in 'Activation", p. 118.
(3) 'Some Reflections on Progress', in 'The Future of Man' (Harper & Row, 1969), p. 82.
(4) 'Centro logy et. al.', in 'Activation", p. 100.
(5) 'Centrologyet. al.', in 'Activation", p. 117.
(6) 'Centrologyet. al.', in 'Activation", p. 113.
(7) 'Centrologyet. al.', in 'Activation", p. 102.
(8) 'A Note on Progress', in, 'Future', p. 20.
(9) 'The New Spirit', in, 'Future, pp. 96-97.
(10) 'The Phenomenon of Man' (Fountain Books, 1977), p.305.
(11) 'Faith in Peace', in, 'Future', pp. 155-156.
(12) 'Faith in Peace', in, 'Future', p. 156.
(13) So far as I can determine, Teilhard placed the end of the Tertiary (and of the Pliocene) at about 500,000 years ago as opposed to the roughly 1,700,000 to 1,600,000 years ago agreed upon by many modern paleontologists. In his essay 'The Question of Fossil Man', written in 1943, we find the 500,000 year figure used in a diagram entitled 'A plausible schematic reconstruction of the natural connections between fossil men'. The diagram in question can be found on page 121 of 'The Appearance of Man' (Harper & Row, 1965).
(14) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 211.
(15) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 211.
(16) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 248.
(17) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 227.
(18) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 225.
(19) 'Phenomenon', p. 183.
(20) 'Centrology et. al.', in 'Activation', p. 146.
(21) 'The Analysis of Life', in 'Activation', p. 137 (In footnote # 5).
(22) 'Life and the Planets', in 'Future', p. 123.
(23) 'The Grand Option', in 'Future', p. 56.
(24) 'The Spirit of the Earth', in 'Human Energy' (Collins, 1969), p. 45.
(25) 'The Spirit of the Earth', in 'Human', p. 45.
(26) 'Phenomenon', pp. 288-289.
(27) 'Phenomenon', p. 289 (In footnote # 1)
(28) 'Man's Place in Nature' (Harper & Row, 1966), p. 112. (29) 'The Formation of the Noosphere', in 'Future',
pp. 173-174.
(30) 'The Formation of the Noosphere', in 'Future', p. 184. (31) 'The Formation of the Noosphere', in 'Future', p. 184. (32) 'The Formation of the Noosphere', in 'Future', p. 173. (33) 'Centrology et. al.', in 'Activation', p. 115 (In footnote # 8).
(34) Cf. 'The Planetization of Mankind', in 'Future', pp. 136-137.
(35) 'Phenomenon', p. 305.
(36) 'Life and the Planets', in 'Future', p. 124.
(37) 'The Heart of Matter', in 'The Heart of Matter' (Harvest Book, 1978), p. 16.
(38) 'Centrology et. al.', in 'Activation', p. 127.
(39) 'Centrology et. al.', in 'Activation', p. 127.
(40) 'Centrology et. al.', in 'Activation', p. 127.
(41) 'The Human Rebound of Evolution et. al.', in 'Future', p.215.
(42) 'The Human Rebound of Evolution et. al.', in 'Future', p.215.
(43) 'The Human Rebound of Evolution et. al.', in 'Future', p.215. (44) 'Phenomenon', p. 297. (45) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 264.
(46) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 264.
(47) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 264.
(48) 'The Singularities of the Human Species', in 'Appearance', p. 264.