(source)
|
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1 May 1881 - 10 Apr 1955)
French philosopher and paleontologist who regarded evolution as not just a physical fact, but also a spiritual truth.
|
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes on Evolution (5 quotes)
>> Click for 28 Science Quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
>> Click for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes on | Discovery | Energy | Matter | Time | Universe | World |
>> Click for 28 Science Quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
>> Click for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes on | Discovery | Energy | Matter | Time | Universe | World |
Human evolution is nothing else but the natural continuation, at a collective level, of the perennial and cumulative process of “psychogenetic” arrangement of matter which we call life. … The whole history of mankind has been nothing else (and henceforth it will never be anything else) but an explosive outburst of ever-growing cerebration. … Life, if fully understood, is not a freak in the universe—nor man a freak in life. On the contrary, life physically culminates in man, just as energy physically culminates in life.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1952). As quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (1984, 1994), 246.
Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. ... The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself....Man is not the center of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful—the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world in terms of life. Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle of all the successive layers of life. ... The universe has always been in motion and at this moment continues to be in motion. But will it still be in motion tomorrow? ... What makes the world in which we live specifically modern is our discovery in it and around it of evolution. ... Thus in all probability, between our modern earth and the ultimate earth, there stretches an immense period, characterized not by a slowing-down but a speeding up and by the definitive florescence of the forces of evolution along the line of the human shoot.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In The Phenomenon of Man (1975), pp 218, 220, 223, 227, 228, 277.
The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In Teilhard de Chardin and Bernard Wall (trans.), The Phenomenon of Man (1959, 2008), 50. Originally published in French as Le Phénomene Humain (1955).
We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In Teilhard de Chardin and Bernard Wall (trans.), The Phenomenon of Man (1959, 2008), 221. Originally published in French as Le Phénomene Humain (1955).
Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In Hymn of the Universe (1969), 22.
See also:
- 1 May - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Teilhard de Chardin's birth.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
.jpg){kind=link}