 | G. W. Leibniz
1646-1716 A German philosopher, mathematician, scientist, diplomat, and lawyer, best known for his contributions to the modern calculus.
"A cumulative increase of the beauty and universal perfection of the works of God, a perpetual and unrestricted progress of the universe as a whole must be recognized, such that it advances to a higher state of cultivation.... As for the objection which may be raised, that if this is true the world will at some time already have become paradise, the answer is not far to seek: even though many substances shall have attained to a great degree of perfection, there will always, on account of the infinite divisibility of the continuum, remain over in the abyss of things parts hitherto dormant, to be aroused and raised to a greater and higher condition.... And for this reason progress will never come to an end.... (I flatter myself that I have some ideas of these truths; but this age is not prepared to receive them.)" (De rerum originatione radicali, 1697)
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 | Immanuel Kant
1724-1804This renowned German philosopher of morals and metaphysics laid many of the foundations of modern philosophy.
"The fruitfulness of Nature is without limits, since it is nothing but the exercise of the Divine Omnipotence.... Even in the essential properties of the elements [in the original condition of Nature], there could be traced the mark of that completeness which they derive from their origin, inasmuch as their nature is but a consequence of the eternal Idea of the Divine Intelligence. The matter which appears to be merely passive and without form and arrangement has even in its simplest state an urge to fashion itself by a natural evolution into a more perfect constitution." (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, 1755)
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 | J. B. Robinet
1735-1820 A little-known French philosopher who was among the first to explore the temporal unfolding of the Great Chain of Being.
"The active power seems to be making efforts to raise itself above the extended, solid, impenetrable mass to which it is chained.... In man...it is evident that matter is only the organ through which the active principle brings its faculties to play. The former is an envelope which modifies the action of the latter, one without which it would perhaps act more freely, but also without which, perhaps, it could not act at all, and without which it assuredly could not render its activities sensible. Does it not, once more, seem that the active power grows and perfects itself in being, in proportion as it raises itself above matter?... At first it would be but the smallest portion of being. By a multiplication of efforts and progressive developments, it would succeed in becoming the principal part. I am strongly inclined to believe that this force is the most essential and the most universal attribute of being -- and that matter is the organ whereby this force manifests its operations. If I am asked to define my conception of such a force, I shall answer, with a number of philosophers, that I represent it to myself as a tendency to change for the better." (Vue philosophie de la gradation naturelle des formes de l'etre, 1768)
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 | J. G. Fichte
1762-1814 A follower and re-interpreter of the philosophy of Kant, Fichte proposed that the external world is ultimately consciousness itself.
"In the human species, spirit constantly develops by means of this struggle of one spirit with another. Thus the whole species becomes richer in spirit. In the first crude attempt [at spiritual communication] the spirit of future ages is already preparing itself. With this help it is able to develop further than those who made the original attempt and will pass on a more perfect presentation, to be further improved by those who follow, who will in turn pass on an even more perfect one. In the earliest recorded ages mankind had already progressed a long way in this spiritual development. You can ascertain the present level of this progress simply by looking around you, and as your own self-development proceeds you will be able to see it even more perfectly.... The first person who asked a question about the existence of God broke through the boundaries; he shook mankind to its deepest foundations and brought man into a conflict with himself which has not yet been resolved and which can only be resolved by proceeding boldly to that supreme point from which the practical and the speculative appear as one." (The Spirit and the Letter within Philosophy, 1794; "Letter to Jacobi," 1795)
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 | Friedrich Schelling
1775-1854 A university professor at age 23, this German philosophical genius explored the mystical depths of evolution.
"Has creation a final goal? And if so, why was it not reached at once? Why was the consummation not realized from the beginning? To these questions there is but one answer: Because God is Life, and not merely Being. All life has a destiny, and is subject to suffering and to becoming. To this, then, God has of his own free will subjected himself.... Being is sensible only in becoming. In Being as such, it is true, there is no becoming...rather, it is itself posited as Eternity. But in the actualization (of Being) through opposition there is necessarily a becoming. Without the conception of a humanly suffering God...history remains wholly unintelligible." (Philosophical Inquiries Into the Nature of Human Freedom, 1809)
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| Georg Hegel
1770-1831 Schelling's former schoolmate achieved universal acclaim for his masterful treatises on social and spiritual evolution.
"That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit -- only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the history of the world -- that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially God's work.... The power of Spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition.... Ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labor of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward." (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807)
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 | Arthur Schopenhauer
1788-1860 A brilliant German philosopher and arch-nemesis of Hegel who combined Eastern mysticism and Kantian idealism.
"The law of causality, and the consideration and investigation of nature which follow on it, lead us necessarily to the certain assumption that each more highly organized state of matter succeeded in time a cruder state.Thus animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the inorganic before that which is organic; consequently the original mass had to go through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet the existence of this whole world remains for ever dependent on that first eye that opened, were it even that of an insect.... This world is the succession of the representations of consciousness, the form of its knowing, and apart from this loses all meaning, and is nothing at all." (The World As Will and Representation, 1819-1844)
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 | Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882 One of America's most influential thinkers, essayists, and public speakers, Emerson also explored the rising tides of evolutionary theory.
"There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle...the same original power which works remotely in grandest and meanest structures by the same design, -- works in a lobster or a miteworm as a wise man would if imprisoned in that poor form. 'Tis the effort of God, of the Supreme Intellect, in the extremest frontier of his universe. As this unity exists in the organization of insect, beast and bird, still ascending to man, and from lower type of man to the highest yet attained, so it does not less declare itself in the spirit or intelligence of the brute. In ignorant ages it was common to vaunt the human superiority by underrating the instinct of other animals; but a better discernment finds that the difference is only of less and more.... 'Tis a long scale from the gorilla to the gentleman from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakespeare -- to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation, the summits of science, art and poetry. The beginnings are slow and infirm, but it is an always accelerated march. The geologic world is chronicled by the growing ripeness of the strata from lower to higher, as it becomes the abode of more highly-organized plants and animals.... Once men thought Spirit divine, and Matter diabolic.... Now science and philosophy recognize the parallelism, the approximation, the unity of the two: how each reflects the other as face answers to face in a glass, nay, how the laws of both are one, or how one is the realization. We are learning not to fear truth." ("The Sovereignty of Ethics," 1878)
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 | Swami Vivekananda
1863-1902 One of the most influential Hindus of modern times, this Indian mystic was instrumental in bringing Eastern spirituality to the West.
"This involution and evolution is going on throughout the whole of nature. The whole series of evolution, beginning with the lowest manifestation of life and reaching up to the highest, the most perfect man, must have been the involution of something else. The question is: The involution of what? What was involved? God.... At the beginning that intelligence becomes involved, and in the end that intelligence gets evolved. The sum total of the intelligence displayed in the universe must, therefore, be the involved universal intelligence unfolding itself. This universal intelligence is what we call God. Call it by any other name, it is absolutely certain that in the beginning there is that Infinite cosmic intelligence. This cosmic intelligence gets involved, and it manifests, evolves itself, until it becomes the perfect man, the 'Christ-man,' the 'Buddha-man.' Then it goes back to its own source." (The Complete Works of Vivekananda)
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 | Henri Bergson
1859-1941 This French philosopher’s passion for spiritual evolution won him wide public acclaim and the Nobel Prize for literature.
"The whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less complete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has fallen back on it.... With man, consciousness breaks the chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself free.... From our point of view, life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a center, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way.... [Thus], not only does consciousness appear as the motive principle of evolution, but also, among conscious beings themselves, man comes to occupy a privileged place. Between him and the animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but of kind." (Creative Evolution, 1907)
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 | Rudolph Steiner
1861-1925 This Austrian philosopher, occultist, architect, social theorist, and author produced volumes on the spiritual evolution of humanity.
"To live by [great] worldviews and philosophies means to work on perfecting ourselves spiritually. Only when we do this do we serve the cosmos as a whole. To perfect oneself in this way is by no means selfish. As long as we are imperfect human beings, we are also imperfect servants of humanity and the world. The more perfected we are, the better we can serve the whole. The saying, 'If a rose is beautiful, it makes the garden beautiful,' is also true of human beings. The founders of the greatest philosophies are therefore great initiates. Their teachings flow into human souls and by this means the whole world advances with humanity. Indeed, they worked consciously for the progress of human evolution. Thus we can understand the content of their teachings only when we bear in mind that it is drawn from knowledge of the inmost depths of human nature. The initiates were great gnostics, seekers after knowledge -- they knew -- and they shaped humanity's ideals out of their knowledge. We, too, can approach these great leaders of humanity if, in our own development, we seek to raise ourselves to their heights." (How to Know Higher Worlds, 1904)
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| Sri Aurobindo
1872-1950 This Indian philosopher-sage was the first to combine the concept of spiritual enlightenment with spiritual evolution.
"We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind.... The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is.... If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth." (The Life Divine, 1914-19)
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 | The Mother
1878-1973 The spiritual companion of Sri Aurobindo, this French mystic is considered the first Westerner to become an Indian guru.
"We want an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities. But there is an absolutely indispensable first step that must be accomplished before anything else can be undertaken: the transformation of the consciousness. The starting-point is of course the aspiration for this transformation and the will to realise it.... This change of consciousness is abrupt, so to say; when it occurs, it occurs all of a sudden, although the preparation for it may have been long and slow. I am not speaking here of a mere change in mental outlook, but of a change in the consciousness itself. It is a complete and absolute change, a revolution in the basic poise; the movement is like turning a ball inside out. To the transformed consciousness everything appears not only new and different, but almost the reverse of what it seemed to the ordinary consciousness. In the ordinary consciousness you advance slowly, by successive experiences, from ignorance to a very distant and often doubtful knowledge. In the transformed consciousness your starting-point is knowledge and you proceed from knowledge to knowledge. However, this is only a beginning; for the outer consciousness, the various planes and parts of the outer active being are transformed only slowly and gradually as a result of the inner transformation." ("Transformation," 1950)
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 | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1881-1955 This French paleontologist, philosopher, and priest wrote about the process of spiritual evolution with an unsurpassed scientific rigor.
"For invincible reasons of homogeneity and coherence, the fibers of cosmogenesis require to be prolonged in ourselves far more deeply than flesh and bone. We are not being tossed about and drawn along in the vital current merely by the material surface of our being. But like a subtle fluid, space-time, having drowned our bodies, penetrates our soul. It fills it and impregnates it. It mingles with its powers, until the soul soon no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts. Nothing can escape this flux any longer, for those who know how to see, even though it were the summit of our being, because it can only be defined in terms of increases of consciousness. For is not the very act by which the fine point of our mind penetrates the absolute a phenomenon of emergence? In short, recognized at first in a single point of things, then inevitably having spread to the whole of the inorganic and organic volume of matter, whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world.... The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind...will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us.... All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us.... Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future." (The Human Phenomenon, 1940)
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 | Jean Gebser
1905-1973 A European linguist, poet, and one of the preeminent forefathers of integral psychological and evolutionary theory.
"We are convinced that there are powers arising from within ourselves that are already at work overcoming the deficiency and dubious nature of our rational ego-consciousness via the new aperspectival awareness whose manifestations are surging forth everywhere. The aperspective consciousness structure is a consciousness of the whole, an integral consciousness encompassing all time and embracing both man's distant past and his approaching future as a living present. The new spiritual process can take root only through an insightful process of intensive awareness.... Our concern is to render transparent everything latent 'behind' and 'before' the world -- to render transparent our own origin, our entire human past, as well as the present, which already contains the future. We are shaped and determined not only by today and yesterday, but by tomorrow as well." (The Ever-Present Origin, 1949)
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 | Barbara Marx Hubbard
1929- This American futurist, author, and public speaker is pioneering a new spiritual paradigm called "Conscious Evolution."
"In conscious evolution, our spiritual experience expands to include resonance with the design of evolution. Our spiritual growth awakens our social potential, pressing us deeper inward to pick up that design and outward to express our creativity in the world through vocation. We work from within ourselves toward higher consciousness, greater freedom, and more complex order to effect a change in the world, first and foremost through our personal evolution.... With conscious evolution we are on the threshold of a cocreative spirituality as we learn to attune to the deeper patterns of creation. The lives of great avatars were transformed by resonance with deeper reality. Now, because of the rise of consciousness in ourselves, our lives can also be lifted up, not as saints or seers, but as humans at the next stage of our natural evolution -- as imaginal cells, cocreative with the processes of evolution." (Conscious Evolution, 1998)
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 | Beatrice Bruteau
1930- A student of Hinduism and Catholicism, Bruteau has written numerous books about evolutionary theory and theology.
"Everything is making its difference to the whole. No one is ever outside the God-Process. But it goes only where we go with it. It doesn't force us, we are the movers from the inside. It won't go forward unless we move it forward. That is why we are all so important. We cannot wait for the world to turn, for the times to change that we may change with them, for the revolution to come and carry us round in its new course. No more will the evolutionary forces of nature propel us in their groping way through the next critical point into a new state of being. From now on, if we are to have any future, we must create that future ourselves. We ourselves are the future and we are the revolution." (What Is Enlightenment? Issue 21, 2002)
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 | Ken Wilber
1949- This contemporary American philosopher has done more than any other to bridge the spiritual gulf between the East and West.
"If we talk about enlightenment as the union of emptiness and form, the pure emptiness doesn't change because it doesn't enter the stream of time. But the form does change, and the two of those are inextricably united. And therefore there is, in that sense, an evolution of enlightenment. And in the modern era when evolution itself is understood, which is to say when evolution became part of the consciousness of Spirit's manifestation, what we're seeing is an increasing transparency of enlightenment manifesting in the world of form.... It can be said very simply; obviously it's very hard to embody. But the basic rule is: Resting as emptiness, embrace the entire world of form. And the world of form is unfolding. It is evolving. It is developing. And therefore resting as blissful emptiness, you ecstatically embrace and push against the world of form as a duty." ( What Is Enlightenment? Issue 21, 2002. )
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 | Brian Swimme
1950- A physicist, cosmologist, and author, whose popular works convey the epic grandeur and mystery of the evolutionary process.
"The primary challenge of this cosmological transformation of consciousness is the awareness that each being in the universe is an origin of the universe. 'The center of the cosmos' refers to that place where the great birth of the universe happened at the beginning of time, but it also refers to the upwelling of the universe as river, as star, as raven, as you, the universe surging into existence anew. The consciousness that learns it is at the origin point of the universe is itself an origin of the universe. The awareness that bubbles up each moment that we identify as ourselves is rooted in the originating activity of the universe. We are all of us arising together at the center of the cosmos." (The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, 1996)
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Original url. The original intriging list of evolutionary philosophers and quotations by Tom Huston has been copied from Andrew Cohen's 
