Quotes from book
The Phenomenon of Man

The Phenomenon of Man
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin Original title Le Phénomène Humain (French, 1955)

The Phenomenon of Man is an essay by the French philosopher, paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.


Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo

“However convergent it be, evolution cannot attain to fulfilment on earth except through a point of dissociation. With this we are introduced to a fantastic and inevitable event which now begins to take shape in our perspective, the event which comes nearer with every day that passes: the end of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate phase of the phenomenon of man. …
Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated, this essentially convergent movement will attain such intensity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be obliged—as happened to the individual forces of instinct—to reflect upon itself at a single point; that is to say, in this case, to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration. This will be the end and the fulfilment of the spirit of the earth.
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 end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega. …
Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? … Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it—the part which decided to "cross the threshold", to get outside itself into the other. …
The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe.”

pp. 273, 287–289 https://archive.org/stream/ThePhenomenonOfMan/phenomenon-of-man-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin#page/n137/mode/1up/,
The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”

The Phenomenon of Man (1955)
Context: 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 photo

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