"Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world. Receive, O Lord, in its totality the Host which creation, drawn by your magnetism, presents to you at the dawn of a new day. This bread, our effort, is in itself, I know, nothing but an immense disintegration. This wine, our anguish, as yet, alas! is only an evaporating beverage. But in the depths of this inchoate Mass you have placed — I am certain, for I feel it — an irresistible and holy desire that moves us all, the impious as well as the faithful to cry out: "O Lord, make us one!""

"Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation"

"This soul can only be a conspiracy of individuals"

"If THIS book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a... theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise."

"This book deals with man solely as a phenomenon; but... with the whole pheneomenon..."

"The degree of concentration of a consciousness varies in inverse ratio to the simplicity of the material compound... Spiritual perfection (or conscious 'centreity') and material synthesis (or complexity) are but two aspects or connected parts of one and the same phenomenon."

"In sum, all the rest of this essay will be nothing but the story of the struggle in the universe between the unified multiple and the unorganized multitude: the full application of great Law of complexity and consciousness: a law that... implies a psychically convergent structure and curvature of the world."

"There is no concept more familiar... than... spiritual energy, yet there is none... more opaque scientifically."

"Nowhere... is the need more urgent of building a bridge between the... the physical and the moral..."

"To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul, in a coherent manner: science has provisionally decided to ignore the question... caught up as we are here in the logic of a system where the within of things has just as much or... more value than their without... we must advance."

"Sometimes we need bread, sometimes wine, sometimes a tonic or a hormone injection, sometimes the stimulation of a colour, sometimes the magic of a sound which goes in at our ears as a vibration and reaches our brains in the form of inspiration. ...[T]here is something through which material and spiritual energy hold together and are complementary. ...[T]here must be a single energy operating in the world. ...[T]he 'soul' must be ...a focal point of transformation ...[F]orces of bodies converge, to become interiorised and sublimated in beauty and truth. ...Yet, ...direct transformation of one of these two energies into the other... has to be abandoned. As... we try to couple them... their mutual independence becomes as clear as their interrelation."

"To the cosmic corpuscles we should find it natural to attribute an individual radius of action as limited as their dimensions. We find, on the contrary, that each of them can only be defined by virtue of its influence on all around it. Whatever space we suppose it to be in, each cosmic element radiates in it and entirely fills it. However narrowly the heart of an atom may be circumscribed, its realm is co-extensive, at least potentially, with that of every other atom. This strange property we will come across again, even in the human molecule."

"[W]e realise... the fact and... reason for the diversity of animal behaviour. From the moment we regard evolution as... psychical transformation, we see... a multitude of forms of instincts each corresponding to a... solution of the problem of life. The 'psychical' make-up of an insect is not and cannot be that of a vertebrate ; nor can... [that] of a squirrel be that of a cat or... elephant: this in virtue of the position[s]... on the tree of life. ...[W]e begin to see ...a gradation formed. If instinct is a variable dimension, the instincts will... create, beneath their complexity, a growing system. They will form as a whole a... fan-like structure in which the higher terms on each nervure are recognised... by a greater range of choice and depending on a better defined centre of coordination and consciousness. ...The 'psychical' make-up of a dog... is... superior to that of a mole or a fish. ...[T]he upholders of the spiritual explanation have no need to be disconcerted when they see... in the higher animals (particularly in the great apes) ways and reactions which strangely recall... 'a reasoning soul'. If the story of life is no more than a movement of consciousness veiled by morphology, it is inevitable that... in the proximity of man, the 'psychical' make-ups seem to reach the borders of intelligence."