the unimpeachable wholeness of the whole

 

.

Considered it its physical, concrete reality, the stuff of the universe can not divide itself but, as a kind of gigantic ‘atom', it forms in its totality (apart from thought from which it is centred and concentrated at the other end) the only real indivisible. 

The history of consciousness and its place in the world remain incomprehensible to anyone who has not seen first of all that the cosmos which man finds himself caught up by constitutes, by reason of the unimpeachable wholeness of the whole, a system, a totum and a quantum : a system by its plurality, a totum by its unity, a quantum by its energy ; all three within a boundless contour. […] The further and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of it parts. 

Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others : from beneath itself by the mysterious phenomenon of ‘composition’ which makes it subsistent through the apex of an organized whole; and from above through the influence of unities of a higher order which incorporate and dominate it for their own ends.

All around us, as far as the eye can see, the universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece.

—Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

.