“I’m setting out in a notebook various thoughts, that gradually fall into groups around several main centres. I still think that my first essay will attempt to define my views on the constructive (creative, I might even say) properties of hope. (1) I shall begin, I imagine, by expressing as vividly as I can our situation in regard to the future: flung into existence, we are forced to advance into a future which terrifies us by its novelty and disheartens us by the ‘chance ‘ that seems to govern its development. We suffer equally from the determinist processes that involve us in their various phases, and from the forbidding indeterminism of chances whose multiplicity and slenderness make it impossible for us to control them.—(2) Following upon that, I shall put forward (without proving it except by its effectiveness in action and its compatibility with dogma) a particular concept of faith. If the future seems to us so uncontrollable—both in its causal sequences and its capaciousness—it is because we are afraid to plunge with it.”

–– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind; Letters from a Soldier-Priest (p. 234-35);