I – Scientific analysis and sense of synthesis
“This excerpt is the text of a conference given by Teilhard de Chardin in Paris on February 27, 1921
“… Without wishing to tackle head-on the question of how Science is good, even indispensable, for the full development of the Christian, I will try to make you
to love Science in a Christian way, by establishing the following two propositions:
1) The scientific study of the World, because it is essentially analytical, makes us first walk in the opposite direction of the divine realities.
2) But, on the other hand, this same scientific penetration of things, by revealing to us the synthetic structure of the World, leads us to make an about-face, and rejects us, by its natural prolongation, towards the unique Center of Things, which is God Our Lord…”
II- My Universe
The first writing entitled My World dates from 1918. This one is dated March 25, 1924 when Teilhard was in Tientsin, China.
“… The following pages do not claim to provide a definitive explanation of the World. … I [Teilhard de Chardin] propose simply to expose here the personal way of understanding the World to which I found myself progressively led by the inevitable development of my human and Christian conscience.
… It will be easy, of course, from an intellectual point of view, to criticize the system I propose … whether my philosophy is more or less skilful, it will always remain a fact that an average man of the 20th century [Teilhard de Chardin]Because he normally participated in the ideas and preoccupations of his time, he could only find the balance of his interior life in a physicalist and unitary conception of the World and of Christ…”.
