The text below is part of the preface to the book O HOMEM (THE MAN) by Huberto Rohden (1893-1981), published in 1980. In it, the author does not intend to exhaust a subject widely evaluated by science; however, he travels in his speculations in time and space in search of a new theory, a new insight into the question.
Star masses, galaxies, an incandescent planet that cools and covers itself with Life – minerals, living organisms, cells, plants, animals, and, crowning everything: man.
The origin of the human being is still covered by a not very transparent veil, where materialist theories about its appearance multiply. An apparent mystery; the challenge of the “missing link”, which is a moment in history when science cannot identify; in other words, many speculations. The fact is that man is a reality on the face of the Earth, existing on it for millions of years.
With advances in science and metaphysics, the time will come when the idea that man has always existed but that he did not come from any inferior non-human being will be accepted. Man, and all other beings of nature are part of the thought of reason in the laboratories of the Creative Potencies.
It is quite common in informal discussions, which is asked in all spheres of relationships: who was born first, the chicken or the egg? And the answer is: the idea was born first because everything one wants to create is taken from an idea! The man may possibly have worn various garments in the course of his pilgrimage on Earth; however, the idea of creating a species called a human was the basic principle.
His physical characteristics changed over the millennia due to the customs and environments in which he lived, such as his craniofacial characteristics. The paleolithic man had a marked upper and lower splanchnic region, where the mastication organs are located, including the fourth molars, but with the upper portion of the skull reduced.
With the advancement of intellect and less rudimentary food, the brain developed, gradually giving the appearance of today's man. The man of the future, one day, will have other craniofacial characteristics, the reduced splanchnic region and the enlarged brain, but man, as an idea, essence, has always been the same, of today, of the future as well as of his remote past.
Man is a singular creature. A stupendous phenomenon. A big puzzle. With his appearance on the Earth's scenario, nature marks the most remarkable milestone in his evolution. He is a “discontinuity in the continuity” of life, a creature with a wide range of creativity. He alone has the most outstanding faculties and gifts that make him unique among other creatures. Unlike nonhumans, he is not just another simple fact in the landscape he lives in, but a conscious factor that transforms and invents. He is a creative creature who has embarked on his major cosmic adventure towards his plenitude.
What is written below is not just a brilliant narrative of man’s nature, origin, and evolution; it is much more. It is a genuine treatise on universal philosophy. A cosmic view of the whole man and human phenomena rarely attained by other scholars.
Rohden, as a thinker of the future and historian of ideas, focusing on his intuition, walks from the mythological conception of man through the zoological concept and culminates in the ontological vision, which is a synthesis of the biological, historical, cultural and metaphysical evolution of man. The only vision that gives “a sense of life” to human existence itself.
The author's solution to the problem is grand and simple at the same time: creation and evolution harmonize and complete each other. The Universe is a unity in diversity. The Uni (the Creator) is continually manifesting in the Verse (the creatures). Essence revealing itself as existence. Infinite Life in finite living. In reality, the Universe would be incomplete without man; in him, the cosmic pyramid converges at a culminating apex.
“Almost all the books dealing with the essence of the man are limited to focusing on his multimillennial evolution, from the remote times in which he lived, to the man of the Cosmonautical era. These books deal with the physical-mental evolution of man but silently omit his metaphysical-rational origin; they talk about the channels, but they say nothing about the source.
The integral science of our days demands a metaphysical basis for all material things. According to Einstein, “from the world of facts, it does not lead any path to the world of values because these come from another region”. Facts emerge from the mind directed towards science; values are born from consciousness.
The values of metaphysics cannot be derived from the facts of physics - the material word - but have their origin “in another region”, in the metaphysical world. Facts can be analyzed by intelligence, while values are intuited by spiritual reason, which Einstein often refers to: “The fundamental laws of the Cosmos cannot be discovered by logic, only by intuition”.
This synthesis of physical facts and metaphysical values forms the integral science of our day.
Those who speak only of the historical condition of man through successive potentialities do not consider integral science, which includes the Potency, the source, from which all potentialities derive.
Man can only be comprehended when viewed under the perspective of his integral reality, as a physical or material fact and as a metaphysical factor, as highlighted by Albert Einstein, Victor Frankl and other representatives of integral science. With partial science, it can be accepted that man has come through various forms and historical potentialities - with the exponents of integral science, it can be admitted that all potentialities are channels that come from a source or a Potency that created it. The man logically supposes a metaphysical source or cause.
The logic of mathematics says that an effect cannot be greater than its cause but can use a smaller condition or channel through which it flows. A lesser potentiality (non-human form) could not develop into a greater (human) potentiality because the greater is not contained in the lesser.
No logical thought can admit the mythological theory of certain theologians, according to which the first man would have appeared on Earth as a perfect man, who would later have become imperfect through the intervention of an anti-divine entity. History knows that man emerged with the least degree of perfection. Still, he was endowed with perfectibility, which came from the source or Potency, which manifests itself through various potentialities, through evolution. The possibility of evolution derives from the Potency, which manifests itself gradually, in time and space, through successive potentialities.
Moses' expression in Genesis that man's body is made of “the substance of the earth” is scientifically accurate when one considers that there is nothing in the human body that does not exist in the elements of nature. Still, nevertheless, the idea that God made a puppet out of clay is a false interpretation of a great reality.
With the admission of a Potency as the cause or source of all evolutionary potentialities, it is faced with the crux of the problem, which divides the integral science of the great geniuses from the partial science of the mediocre talents. In his time, 17th century, René Descartes wrote that nothing could be proven analytically if it does not assume something like an intuitive postulate.
Intuition is not a hypothesis, vague and uncertain, but it is immediate and unquestionable evidence. For example, a pipe two centimetres in diameter and a few meters in length drain thousands of tons of water, which never runs out. No one will say that this enormous amount of water was contained in the pipeline or even in the water tank connected to it. Every sane man admits that these tons of water come from a perennial source, from which the water is piped; the water comes from the source and flows through the pipes. Although the townspeople have never seen this distant source, they all assume, consciously or unconsciously, its existence as a sure postulate rather than a more or less likely hypothesis.
Applying this analogy to man, the geniuses of integral science admit as a postulate a creative Potency, from which potentialities derive, as channels derive from their source. Representatives of partial science are content with analyzing physical channels or potentials. In contrast, geniuses of integral science intuitively know that any medium filled with water assumes for sure a source of perennial waters, a Potency as the cause of all effects or potentialities. Anyone who cannot form a hypothesis on a premise can prove nothing, just as an architect cannot construct a building without evaluating the structure of the ground. But this ground is not his work; it is a premise, direct evidence for the builder.
One can admit all the historical facts that science has proven as evolutionary stages of man, even the facts prior to the nature of man. Still, beyond these historical facts, one can sustain the indisputable need for a source, the Potency that created everything, which justifies these potentials. And this intuitive premise can be admitted, not by virtue of any religious belief, but as the categorical imperative of integral science, which does not admit effects, smaller or greater, without admitting a maximum cause, such as source or Potency. Because of logic and mathematics, it is necessary to accept this intuitive premise as an indispensable basis for analytical science.
Man can only be comprehended according to the integral science, from the cosmological thesis of reality, not in traditional theories like mythological or zoological.
Some try to invalidate this argument by claiming that a lesser cause can come a greater effect, as the facts of nature prove. Well, isn't the plant bigger than the seed? And is not the bird more perfect than the egg from which it hatched?
It so happens that in the organic world, nothing thrives without specific conditions, such as water and light, humidity and heat. A seed without water and heat does not sprout; an egg without moisture and heat dies without hatching. This, even the hen knows, when heats the eggs with the body. She even abandons them periodically to cause dampness by the alternation of heat and cold. And it was through the behaviour of the hen that the farmer uses an electric incubator to maintain heat and humidity.
Water and light, moisture and heat, are the Cosmic Potencies that use seed and egg to transform them into plant and bird. The seed and the egg function as conditions, which the cause of the Cosmic Forces use to produce the effect.
The Cosmic Forces are of unlimited potency, which as a cause need limited conditions to produce their effects.
Man, too, is an effect of Cosmic Potency that reveals itself in telluric potentiality.”
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