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Pere Teilhard de Chardin - Pensees

It is easy for the pessimist to belittle that extraordinary period of history during which in the space of a few thousand years, civilisations crumbled one after another into ruin.  But it is surely far more scientific to discern once again, beneath these successive waxings and wanings, the great spiral of life always irreversibly ascending, but by stages, along the dominant line of evolution.  Susa, Memphis, Athens may crumble, but an ever more highly organised awareness of the universe is passed on from hand to hand and increases with each successive stage in clarity and brilliance.

Once we admit the existence of a critical point of species formation at the end of the technical developments and civilisations, we realise that what finally opens out at the peak of time (maintaining to the end the priority of tension over rest in biogenesis) is an issue – an issue not merely for our hopes of escape but also for our awaiting some revelation.  And this is exactly what could best relieve that tension between light and darkness, exaltation and anguish, into which a renewed awareness of our human species has plunged us...

It is at the point of spiritual concentration and not at its base of material arrangements that humanity must biologically establish its equilibrium.