An experiment with reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Formation of the Noösphere (January 1947), in which I underlined what seemed the most portentious phrases and longer passages in 17-odd pages of text, to serve as an armature for later re-reading of the text:
...A sense of collectivity...a coherent view of the "thinking Earth"
...an envelope of thinking substance
...the power acquired by its consciousness of turning in upon itself
...the extraordinary agglutinative property of thought
...the super-organism we have been seeking
...the existence and development of a circulatory or a nutritional system applicable to mankind as a whole.
...heredity, hitherto primarily chromosomic (that is to say, carried by the genes) becomes primarily "noöspheric"
...it acquires, by becoming exterior to the individual, an incomparable substance and capacity
...a very real social inheritance, produced by the syntehtic recording of human experience
...a mechanized envelope (coherent within itself and immensely varied) appertaining to all mankind
...the creation of a truly collective consciousness
...the new concepts and intuitions which ... have become or are in process of becoming the indestructible keystones and fabric of our thought
...It is not a question of simple repetitive "summation" but of synthesis
...something is purposefully stirring
...a state of organized co-penetration, in which each element is linked with every other
...that the enormous surplus of free energy released by the in-folding of the Noösphere is destined by a natural evolutionary process to flow into the construction and functioning of what I have called its "Brain." As in the case of all the organisms preceding it, but on an immense scale, humanity is in process of "cerebralizing" itself... The Noösphere, in short, is a stupendous thinking machine.
...We have found it possible to express the social totalization which we are undergoing in terms of a clearly identifiable biological process
...Humanity, as I have said, is building its composite brain beneath our eyes
...What at the very beginning the first man, was, as we know, the heightening of the individual consciousness to the point where it acquired the power of reflection. And the measure of human progress during the centuries which followed is, as I have sought to show, the increase of this reflective power through the interaction, or conjugated thought, of conscious minds working upon one another.