The Future of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Harper, $5.00 Jesuits I met in East Asia who had known Fr. Teilhard for years in China, agreed that he was a charming man with a somewhat flighty and superficial mind, easily carried away by sentiment and imagination. This would still leave him a good priest and a man of good will; as a philosopher, however, he hardly qualifies except in an age which asks not for truth but for “vision.”
Teilhard had vision, plenty of it, enough to make him a science-fiction writer of the first order. Unfortunately, his hobby was not story-telling but philosophy, the kind that is studded with statements like: “It is Mankind as a whole, collective humanity, which is called upon to perform the definitive act whereby the total force of terrestrial evolution will be released and flourish.” Whatever this means, it has very little to do with exact observation, precise thinking, and reasonable inference.
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