Saturday, March 23, 2019

Titus Burckhardt's traditionalist critique of Evolution



Titus Burckhardt on the Theory of Evolution writes :

The least phenomenon participates in several continuities or cosmic dimensions incommensurable in relation to each other; thus, ice is water as regards its substance—and in this respect it is indistinguishable from liquid water or water vapor—but as regards its state it belongs to the class of solid bodies. Similarly, when a thing is constituted by diverse elements, it participates in their natures while being different from them. Cinnabar, for example, is a synthesis of sulphur and mercury; it is thus in one sense the sum of these two elements, but at the same time it possesses qualities that are not to be found in either of these two substances. Quantities can be added to one another, but a quality is never merely the sum of other qualities. By mixing the colors blue and yellow, green is obtained; this third color is thus a synthesis of the other two, but it is not the product of a simple addition, for it represents at the same time a chromatic quality that is new and unique in itself. 
There is here something like a “discontinuous continuity”, which is even more marked in the biological order, where the qualitative unity of an organism is plainly distinguishable from its mate- rial composition. The bird that is born from the egg is made from the same elements as the egg, but it is not the egg. Likewise, the butterfly that emerges from a chrysalis is neither that chrysalis nor the caterpillar that produced it. A kinship exists between these various organisms, a genetic continuity, but they also display a qualitative discontinuity, since between the caterpillar and the butterfly there is something like a rupture of level. 
At every point in the cosmic web there is thus a warp and a woof that intersect one another, and this is indicated by the traditional symbolism of weaving, according to which the threads of the warp, which hang vertically on the primitive loom, represent the permanent essences of things—and thus also the essential qualities and forms—while the woof, which binds horizontally the threads of the warp, and at the same time covers them with its alternating waves, corresponds to the substantial or “material” continuity of the world.
The same law is expressed by classical hylomorphism, which distinguishes the “form” of a thing or being—the seal of its essential unity—from its “matter”, namely the plastic substance which receives this seal and furnishes it with a concrete and limited existence. No modern theory has ever been able to replace this ancient theory, for the fact of reducing the whole plenitude of the real to one or other of its “dimensions” hardly amounts to an explanation of it. Modern science is ignorant above all of what the Ancients designated by the term “form”, precisely because it is here a question of a non-quantitative aspect of things, and this ignorance is not unconnected with the fact that modern science sees no criterion in the beauty or ugliness of a phenomenon: the beauty of a thing is the sign of its internal unity, its conformity with an indivisible essence, and thus with a reality that will not let itself be counted or measured. 



It is necessary to point out here that the notion of “form” necessarily includes a twofold meaning: on the one hand it means the delimitation of a thing, and this is its most usual meaning; in this connection, form is situated on the side of matter or, in a more general sense, on the side of plastic substance, which limits and separates realities.7 On the other hand, “form” understood in the sense given to it by the Greek philosophers and, following them, the Scholastics, is the aggregate of qualities pertaining to a being or a thing, and thus the expression or the trace of its immutable essence. 
The individual world is the “formal” world because it is the domain of those realities that are constituted by the conjunction of a “form” and a “matter”, whether subtle or corporeal. It is only in connection with a “matter”, a plastic substance, that “form” plays the role of a principle of individuation; in itself, in its ontological basis, it is not an individual reality but an archetype, and as such beyond limitations and change. 

Thus a species is an archetype, and if it is only manifested by the individuals that belong to it, it is nevertheless just as real, and even incomparably more real, than they. As for the rationalist objection that tries to prove the absurdity of the doctrine of archetypes by arguing that a multiplication of mental notions would imply a corresponding multiplication of archetypes—leading to the idea of the idea of the idea, and so on— it quite misses the point, since multiplicity can in no wise be transposed onto the level of the archetypal roots. The latter are distinguished in a principial way, within Being and by virtue of Being; in this connection, Being can be envisaged as a unique and homogeneous crystal potentially containing all possible crystalline forms.8 Multiplicity and quantity thus only exist at the level of the “material” reflections of the archetypes. 
From what has just been said, it follows that a species is in itself an immutable “form”; it cannot evolve and be transformed into another species, although it may include variants, which are diverse “projections” of a unique essential form, from which they can never be detached, any more than the branches of a tree can be detached from the trunk. 



It has been justly said9 that the whole thesis of the evolution of species, inaugurated by Darwin, is founded on a confusion between species and simple variation. Its advocates put forward as the “bud” or the beginning of a new species what in reality is no more than a variant within the framework of a determinate specific type. This false assimilation is, however, not enough to fill the numberless gaps that occur in the paleontological succession of species; not only are related species separated by profound gaps, but there do not even exist any forms that would indicate any possible connection between different orders such as fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. 
One can doubtless find some fishes that use their fins to crawl onto a bank, but one will seek in vain in these fins for the slightest beginning of that articulation which would render possible the formation of an arm or a paw. Likewise, if there are certain resemblances between reptiles and birds, their respective skeletons are nonetheless of a fundamentally different structure. Thus, for example, the very complex articulation in the jaws of a bird, and the related organization of its hearing apparatus, pertain to an entirely different plan from the one found in reptiles; it is difficult to conceive how one might have developed from the other.10 As for the famous fossil bird Archaeopteryx, it is fairly and squarely a bird, despite the claws at the end of its wings, its teeth, and its long tail.11 
In order to explain the absence of intermediate forms, the partisans of transformism have sometimes argued that these forms must have disappeared because of their very imperfection and precariousness; but this argument is plainly in contradiction with the principle of selection that is supposed to be the operative factor in the evolution of species: the trial forms should be incomparably more numerous than the ancestors having already acquired a definitive form. Besides, if the evolution of species represents, as is declared, a gradual and continual process, all the real links in the chain—therefore all those that are destined to be followed—will be both endpoints and intermediaries, in which case it is difficult to see why the ones would be much more precarious than the others.12 
The more conscientious among modern biologists either reject the transformist theory, or else maintain it as a “working hypothesis”, being unable to conceive any genesis of species that would not be situated on the “horizontal line” of a purely physical and temporal becoming. For Jean Rostand, The world postulated by transformism is a fairy-like world, phantasmagoric, surrealistic. The chief point, to which one always returns, is that we have never been present, even in a small way, at one authentic phenomenon of evolution. . . . We keep the impres- sion that nature today has nothing to offer that might be capable of reducing our embarrassment before the veritably organic meta- morphoses implied in the transformist thesis. We keep the impression that, in the matter of the genesis of species as in that of the genesis of life, the forces that constructed nature are now absent from nature.13 



Even so, this biologist sticks to the transformist theory: 
I firmly believe—because I see no means of doing otherwise— that mammals have come from lizards, and lizards from fish; but when I declare and when I think such a thing, I try not to avoid seeing its indigestible enormity, and I prefer to leave vague the origin of these scandalous metamorphoses rather than add to their improbability that of a ludicrous interpretation.14 
All that paleontology proves to us is that the various animal forms, such as are shown by fossils preserved in successive earthly layers, made their appearance in a vaguely ascending order, going from relatively undifferentiated organisms—but not simple ones15—to ever more complex forms, without this ascension representing, however, an unequivocal and continuous line. It seems to move in jumps; in other words, whole categories of animals appear all at once, without real predecessors. What does this order mean? Simply that, on the material plane, the simple or relatively undifferentiated always precedes the complex and differentiated. All “matter” is like a mirror that reflects the activity of the essences, while also inverting it; this is why the seed comes before the tree and the bud before the flower, whereas in the principial order the perfect “forms” pre-exist. The successive appearance of animal forms according to an ascending hierarchy therefore in no wise proves their continual and cumulative genesis.16 
On the contrary, what links the various animal forms to one another is something like a common model, which reveals itself more or less through their structures and which is more apparent in the case of animals endowed with superior consciousness such as birds and mammals. This model is expressed especially in the symmetrical disposition of the body, in the number of extremities and sensory organs, and also in the general form of the chief internal organs. It might be suggested that the design and number of certain organs, and especially those of sensation, simply correspond to the terrestrial surroundings; but this argument is reversible, because those surroundings are precisely what the sensory organs grasp and delimit. In fact, the model underlying all animal forms establishes the analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Against the background of this common cosmic pattern, the differences between species and the gaps that separate them are all the more marked. 
Instead of “missing links”, which the partisans of transformism seek in vain, nature offers us, as if in irony, a large variety of animal forms which, without transgressing the pre-established framework of a species, imitate the appearance and habits of a species or order foreign to them. Thus, for example, whales are mammals, but they assume the appearance and behavior of fishes; hummingbirds have the appearance, iridescent colors, flight, and mode of feeding of butterflies; the armadillo is covered with scales like a reptile, although it is a mammal; and so on. Most of these animals with imitative forms are higher species that have taken on the forms of relatively lower species, a fact which a priori excludes an interpretation of them as intermediary links in an evolution. As for their interpretation as forms of adaptation to a given set of surroundings, this seems more than dubious, for what could be, for example, the inter- mediate forms between some land mammal or other and the dolphin?17 Among these “imitative” forms, which constitute so many extreme cases, we must also include the fossil bird Archaeopteryx mentioned above. 
Since each animal order represents an archetype that includes the archetypes of the corresponding species, one might well ask oneself whether the existence of “imitative” animal forms does not contradict the immutability of the essential forms; but this is not the case, for the existence of these forms demonstrates, on the contrary, that very immutability by a logical exhausting of all the possibilities inherent in a given type or essential form. It is as if nature, after bringing forth fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, with their distinctive characteristics, wished still to show that she was able to produce an animal like the dolphin which, while being a true mammal, at the same time possesses almost all the faculties of a fish, or a creature like the tortoise, which possesses a skeleton covered by flesh, yet at the same time is enclosed in an exterior carapace after the fashion of certain molluscs.18 Thus does nature manifest her protean power, her inexhaustible capacity for generation, while remaining faithful to the essential forms, which in fact are never blurred. 


Each essential form—or each archetype—includes after its fashion all the others, but without confusion; it is like a mirror reflecting other mirrors, which reflect it in their turn.19 In its deepest meaning the mutual reflection of types is an expression of the metaphysical homogeneity of Existence, or of the unity of Being. 
Some biologists, when confronted with the discontinuity in the paleontological succession of species, postulate an evolution by leaps and, in order to make this theory plausible, refer to the sudden mutations observed in some living species. But these muta- tions never exceed the limits of an anomaly or a decadence, as for example the sudden appearance of albinos, or of dwarfs, or of giants; even when these characteristics become hereditary, they remain as anomalies and never constitute new specific forms.20 For this to happen, it would be necessary for the vital substance of an existing species to serve as the “plastic material” for a newly mani- fested specific form; in practice, this means that one or several females of this existing species would suddenly bear offspring of a new species. Now, as the hermeticist Richard the Englishman writes: 
Nothing can be produced from a thing that is not contained in it; for this reason, every species, every genus, and every natural order develops within the limits proper to it and bears fruits according to its own kind and not according to an essentially dif- ferent order; everything that receives a seed must be of the same seed.21 
Fundamentally, the evolutionist thesis is an attempt to replace, not simply the “miracle of creation”, but the cosmogonic process— largely supra-sensory—of which the Biblical narrative is a Scriptural symbol; evolutionism, by absurdly making the greater derive from the lesser, is the opposite of this process, or this “emanation”. (This term has nothing to do with the emanationist heresy, since the transcendence and immutability of the ontological principle are here in no wise called in question.) In a word, evolutionism results from an incapacity—peculiar to modern science—to conceive “dimensions” of reality other than purely physical ones; to understand the “vertical” genesis of species, it is worth recalling what Guénon said about the progressive solidification of the corporeal state through the various terrestrial ages.22 




This solidification must obviously not be taken to imply that the stones of the earliest ages were soft, for this would be tantamount to saying that certain physical qualities— and in particular hardness and density—were then wanting; what has hardened and become fixed with time is the corporeal state taken as a whole, with the result that it no longer receives directly the imprint of subtle forms. Assuredly, it cannot become detached from the subtle state, which is its ontological root and which dominates it entirely, but the relationship between the two states of existence no longer has the creative character that it possessed at the origin; it is as when a fruit, having reached maturity, becomes surrounded by an ever harder husk and ceases to absorb the sap of the tree. In a cyclic phase in which corporeal existence had not yet reached this degree of solidification, a new specific form could manifest itself directly from the starting-point of its first “condensation” in the subtle or animic state;23 this means that the different types of animals pre-existed at the level immediately superior to the corporeal world as non-spatial forms, but nevertheless clothed in a certain “matter”, namely that of the subtle world.

 From there these forms “descended” into the corporeal state each time the latter was ready to receive them; this “descent” had the nature of a sudden coagulation and hence also the nature of a limitation and fragmentation of the original animic form. Indo-Tibetan cosmology describes this descent—which is also a fall—in the case of human beings under the form of the mythological combat of the devas and asûras: the devas having created man with a body that was fluid, protean, and diaphanous—in other words, in a subtle form—the asûras try to destroy it by a progressive petrification; it becomes opaque, gets fixed, and its skeleton, affected by the petrification, is immobilized. Thereupon the devas, turning evil into good, create joints, after having fractured the bones, and they also open the pathways of the senses, by piercing the skull, which threatens to imprison the seat of the mind. In this way the process of solidification stops before it reaches its extreme limit, and certain organs in man, such as the eye, still retain something of the nature of the non-corporeal states.24 
In this story, the pictorial description of the subtle world must not be misunderstood. However, it is certain that the process of materialization, from the supra-sensory to the sensory, had to be reflected within the material or corporeal state itself, so that one can say without risk of error, that the first generations of a new species did not leave a mark in the great book of earthly layers; it is therefore vain to seek in sensible matter the ancestors of a species, and especially that of man. 
Since the transformist theory is not founded on any real proof, its corollary and conclusion, namely the theory of the infra-human origin of man, remains suspended in the void. The facts adduced in favor of this thesis are restricted to a few groups of skeletons of disparate chronology: it happens that some skeletal types deemed to be more “evolved”, such as “Steinheim man”, precede others, of a seemingly more primitive character, such as “Neanderthal man”, even though the latter was doubtless not so apelike as tendentious reconstructions would have us believe.25 


If, instead of always putting the questions: at what point does humankind begin, and what is the degree of evolution of such and such a type regarded as being pre-human, we were to ask ourselves: how far does the monkey go, things might well appear in a very different light; for a fragment from a skeleton, even one related to that of man, is hardly enough to establish the presence of that which constitutes man, namely reason, whereas it is possible to conceive of a great variety of anthropoid apes whose anatomies are more or less close to that of man. 
However paradoxical this may seem, the anatomical resem-blance between man and the anthropoid apes is explainable precisely by the difference—not gradual, but essential—that separates man from all other animals. Since the anthropoid form is able to exist without that “central” element that characterizes man—this “central” element manifesting itself anatomically by his vertical position, amongst other things—the anthropoid form must exist; in other words, there cannot but be found, at the purely animal level, a form that realizes in its own way—that is to say, according to the laws of its own level—the very plan of the human anatomy; the ape is a prefiguration of man, not in the sense of an evolutive phase, but by virtue of the law that decrees that at every level of existence analogous possibilities will be found. 
A further question arises in the case of the fossils attributed to primitive men: did some of these skeletons belong to men we can look upon as being ancestors of men presently alive, or do they bear witness to a few groups that survived the cataclysm at the end of a terrestrial age, only to disappear in their turn before the beginning of our present humanity? Instead of primitive men, it might well be a case of degenerate men, who may or may not have existed along- side our real ancestors. We know that the folklore of most peoples speaks of giants or dwarfs who lived long ago, in remote countries; now, among these skeletons, several cases of gigantism are to be found.26 Finally, let it be recalled once more that the bodies of the most ancient men did not necessarily leave solid traces, either because their bodies were not yet at that point materialized or “solidified”, or because the spiritual state of these men, along with the cosmic conditions of their time, rendered possible a resorption of the physical body into the subtle “body” at the moment of death.27 
We must now say a few words about a thesis, much in vogue today, which claims to be something like a spiritual integration of paleontology, but which in reality is nothing but a purely mental sublimation of the crudest materialism, with all the prejudices this includes, from belief in the indefinite progress of humanity to a leveling and totalitarian collectivism, without forgetting the cult of the machine that is at the center of all this; it will be apparent that we are here referring to Teilhardian evolutionism.28




According to Teilhard de Chardin, who is not given to worrying over the gaps inherent in the evolutionist system and largely relies on the climate created by the premature popularization of the transformist thesis, man himself represents only an intermediate state in an evolution that starts with unicellular organisms and ends in a sort of global cosmic entity, united to God. The craze for trying to bring every- thing back to a single unequivocal and uninterrupted genetic line here exceeds the material plane and launches out wildly into an irresponsible and avid “mentalization” characterized by an abstraction clothed in artificial images which their author ends up by taking literally, as if he were dealing with concrete realities. 

We have already mentioned the imaginary genealogical tree of species, whose supposed unity is no more than a snare, being composed of the hypothetical conjunction of many disjointed elements. Teilhard amplifies this notion to his heart’s content, in a manner that is purely graphic, by completing its branches—or “scales”, as he likes to call them—and by constructing a pinnacle in the direction of which humankind is supposed to be situated. By a similar sliding of thought from the abstract to the concrete, from the metaphorical to the supposedly real, he agglutinates, in one and the same pseudo- scientific outburst, the most diverse realities, such as mechanical laws, vital forces, psychic elements, and spiritual entities. Let us quote a characteristic passage: 
What explains the biological revolution caused by the appearance of Man, is an explosion of consciousness; and what, in its turn, explains this explosion of consciousness, is simply the pas- sage of a privileged radius of “corpusculization”, in other words, of a zoological phylum, across the surface, hitherto impermeable, separating the zone of direct Psychism from that of reflective Psychism. Having reached, following this particular radius, a critical point of arrangement (or, as we say here, of enrolment), Life became hypercentered on itself, to the point of becoming capable of foresight and invention. . . .29 
Thus, “corpusculization” (which is a physical process) would have as its effect that a “zoological phylum” (which is no more than a figure) should pass across the surface (purely hypothetical) separating two psychic zones. . . . But we must not be surprised at the absence of distinguos in Teilhard’s thinking since, according to his own theory, the mind is but a metamorphosis of matter! 
Without stopping to discuss the strange theology of this author, for whom God himself evolves along with matter, and without daring to define what he thinks of the prophets and sages of antiquity and other “underdeveloped” beings of this kind, we will say the following: if man, in respect of both his physical nature and his spir- itual nature, were really nothing but a phase of an evolution going from the amoeba to the superman, how could he know objectively where he stands in all this?

 Let us suppose that this alleged evolution forms a curve, or a spiral. The man who is but a fragment thereof—and let it not be forgotten that a “fragment” of a movement is no more than a phase of that movement—can that man step out of it and say to himself: I am a fragment of a spiral which is developing in such and such a way? Now it is certain—and more- over Teilhard de Chardin himself recognizes this—that man is able to judge of his own state. Indeed he knows his own rank amongst the other earthly creatures, and he is even the only one to know objectively both himself and the world. Far from being a mere phase in an indefinite evolution, man essentially represents a central possibility, and one that is thus unique, irreplaceable, and definitive. If the human species had to evolve towards another more perfect and more “spiritual” form, man would not already now be the “point of intersection” of the Divine Spirit with the earthly plane; he would neither be capable of salvation, nor able intellectually to surmount the flux of becoming. To express these thoughts according to the perspective of the Gospels: would God have become man if the form of man were not virtually “god on earth”, in other words, qualitatively central as well as definitive with regard to his own cosmic level? 
As a symptom of our time, Teilhardism is comparable to one of those cracks that are due to the very solidification of the mental carapace,30 and that do not open upward, toward the heaven of real and transcendent unity, but downward toward the realm of lower psychism. Weary of its own discontinuous vision of the world, the materialist mind lets itself slide toward a false continuity or unity, toward a pseudo-spiritual intoxication, of which this falsified and materialized faith—or this sublimated materialism—that we have just described marks a phase of particular significance. 
(from Mirror of the Intellect


6. René Guénon, Symbolism of the Cross (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1996), chapter 14, “The Symbolism of Weaving”. 


7. In Hindu parlance, the distinction nâma-rupa, “name and form”, is related to this aspect of the notion under study, “name” here standing for the essence of a being or thing, and “form” for its limited and outward existence. 

  1. It is self-evident that all the images that one can offer of the non-separative dis- tinction of the possibilities contained in Being must remain imperfect and par- adoxical.
  2. Douglas Dewar, The Transformist Illusion (Murfreesboro, Tennessee: Dehoff Publica- tions, 1957; Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1995). See also Louis Bounoure, Déterminisme et Finalité (Collection Philosophie, Paris: Flammarion).
  3. Dewar, The Transformist Illusion.
11. Ibid. 

12. Teilhard de Chardin (The Human Phenomenon, p. 129) writes on this subject: “Nothing is by nature so delicate and fugitive as a beginning. As long as a zoo- logical group is young, its characteristics remain undecided. Its dimensions are weak. Relatively few individuals compose it, and these are rapidly changing. Both in space and duration, the peduncle (or the bud, which comes to the same thing) of a living branch corresponds to a minimum of differentiation, expansion, and resistance. How then is time going to act on this weak zone? Inevitably by destroying it in its vestiges.” This reasoning, which abusively exploits the purely external and conventional analogy between a genealogical “tree” and a real plant, is an example of the “imaginative abstraction” that char- acterizes this author’s thought. 
13. Le Figaro Littéraire, April 20, 1957. 

14. Ibid. 
  1. The electron microscope has revealed the surprising complexity of the func-
    tions at work within a unicellular being.
  2. The most commonly mentioned example in favor of the transformist thesis is
    the hypothetical genealogy of the Equidae. Charles Depéret criticizes it as fol- lows: “Geological observation establishes in a formal manner that no gradual passage took place between these genera; the last Palaeotherium had long been extinct, without having transformed itself, when the first Architherium made its appearance, and the latter disappeared in turn, without modification, before being suddenly replaced by the invasion of the Hipparion.” (Les Transformations du Monde Animal, p. 107.) To this it can be added that the supposed primitive forms of the horse are hardly to be observed in equine embryology, though the development of the embryo is commonly looked on as a recapitulation of the genesis of the species.
  3. 17. On the subject of the hypothetical transformation of a land animal into the whale, Douglas Dewar writes: “I have often challenged transformists to describe plausible ancestors situated in the intermediate phases of this supposed trans- formation.” (What the Animal Fossils Tell Us, Trans. Vict. Instit, vol. LXXIV.) 
  4. It is significant that the tortoise, whose skeleton seems to indicate an extrava- gant adaptation to an animal “armored” state, appears all at once among the fossils, without evolution. Similarly, the spider appears simultaneously with its prey and with its faculty of weaving already developed.
  5. This is the image used by the Sufi ‘Abd al-Karîm al-Jîlî in his book al-Insân al- Kâmil, chapter on “Divine Unicity”.
20. Bounoure, Déterminisme et Finalité.
21. Quoted in The Golden Treatise, Museum Hermeticum (Frankfurt, 1678). 
  1. René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1995).
  2. Concerning the creation of species in a subtle “proto-matter”—in which they still preserve an androgynous form, comparable to a sphere—and their subse- quent exteriorization by “crystallization” in sensible matter (which is heavy, opaque, and mortal), see Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds (Bloom- ington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1984), chapter 2, “In the Wake of the Fall”, and Dimensions of Islam (New York: Fernhill House, 1970), chapter 2, “The Five Divine Presences.”
24. See Krasinsky, Tibetische Medizin-Philosophie.
25. In general, this domain of science has been almost smothered by tendentious 
theories, hoaxes, and imprudently popularized discoveries. See Dewar, The Transformist Illusion. 
26. Like the Meganthrope of Java and the Gigantopithecus of China.
27. In some very exceptional cases—such as Enoch, Elijah, and the Virgin Mary— 
such a resorption took place even in the present terrestrial age. 

28. Teilhard’s materialism is revealed in all its crudity, and all its perversity, when this philosopher advocates the use of surgical means to accelerate “collective cerebralization” (Man’s Place in Nature, [New York: Harper & Row, 1966]). Let us also quote the further highly revealing words of the same author: “It is finally on the dazzling notion of Progress and on faith in Progress that today’s divided humanity can be reformed. . . . Act I is over! We have access to the heart of the atom! Now come the next steps, such as the vitalization of matter by the building of super-molecules, the modeling of the human organism by hor- mones, the control of heredity and of the sexes by the play of genes and chro- mosomes, the readjustment and liberation by direct action of the springs laid bare by psychoanalysis, the awakening and taking hold of the still dormant intellectual and emotional forces in the human mass!” (Planète III, 1944, p. 30.) Quite naturally, Teilhard proposes the fashioning of mankind by a universal sci- entific government—in short, all that is needed for the reign of the Antichrist. See also the following chapter in this book: “Contra Teilhard de Chardin”. 
29. Man’s Place in Nature, pp. 62-63.













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