Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Supplementary Note

We may press some further statements of Teilhard into service of our contention that he subscribes to panpsychism not only in the sense that life is present in all matter even where it is not apparent but also in the sense that one single life, an identical vital presence, is active in various degrees throughout the universe - a sense which would be a natural and logical step towards pantheism.

A pronouncement at some length in our support meets us on pp. 98-100 of The Vision of the Past (Collins, London, 1966). The article where it occurs is called "The Transformist Paradox" and refers to "the new perspectives of discontinuity and polyphyletism", which seemed to the anatomist Louis Vialleton to tell against the evolutionary hypothesis as generally understood. Teilhard opines that these perspectives, far from making this hypothesis vanish like a mirage, broaden and deepen it and bring about its true expression. Before arriving at his conclusion he has a many-sided argument which cannot but mean panpsychism in an extreme form.

He tells us that hitherto, in the study of life, as in that of matter, scientists have attended to corpuscular forces of matter and to individual actions for the living world. But, besides the properties resulting from the collective play of parts, science needs to investigate properties belonging to the collectivity as such. We cannot fully explain phenomena without taking into account the specific attributes of natural unities larger than those we habitually study. "Terrestrial life," says Teilhard, "stands in the forefront of these entities which invite us to study them directly." He sees this life as forming a solid, unified and patterned mass, which shows itself in currents, oscillations and laws of its own: beyond all individual lives, it functions as "a specific whole". As soon as even a small collection of individual lives is taken in geographical isolation, "a certain balance progressively establishes itself between herbivorous, carnivorous, burrowing and other

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types, as if any large fragment of life - taken as a cutting, as one might say - tended to reproduce as a stem the general design of the tree from which it has been taken". Teilhard asks : "Do not these facts point to an autonomous power of organisation and differentiation, in no way localized in individuals, but diffused in any large portion of animate matter?"

He also notes the sudden appearance and linear development of biological characteristics, and ventures to explain "how it happens that these mutations declare themselves simultaneously in a relatively large number of individuals who suddenly begin to drift simultaneously in the same direction".

Finally, surveying biological evolution in its broad outlines, he observes: "...we see to our surprise that each new blossoming of superior forms reduces the pressure of sap in the lower branches. There seems to be a certain constancy, a certain invariance in the total quantity of energy carried by terrestrial life. Does not this unity of growth between the various realms of the organic world show that there is some actual physical unity informing the whole?"

Proceeding along diverse routes Teilhard affirms: "...we begin seriously to envisage the possible existence of a vast living telluric entity," In "this mysterious but not metaphysical biosphere" he places "the seat, the spring, the ultimate regulator of zoological evolution" and he concludes with "the conception of a universe in which the principal zoological types, as distinct from one another as the rays of a light spectrum, would find their connection in the fact that they radiate from a common force of organic development, whose seat is the world as a whole".

The same conclusion Teilhard puts in the words: "What is plastic in the world of living creatures, what moves, what periodically divides into newly-formed branches, will in this case not be the elements (which are confined to small-scale variations) but the physical power that envelops all these elements."

Whether we agree with Teilhard's arguments or no, his

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panpsychism in the one-life sense for the "telluric" (terrestrial) scene is undeniable. And, granted this range, a cosmic panpsychism in the same sense is a legitimate imputation in the light of his assertion that matter is intrinsically animate everywhere.

Such an assertion, read in its full depth, we can ultimately equate to the vision of what we may Shelleyanly term "the one Spirit's plastic stress" in the universal phenomenon.

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