Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
  Though Barfield's Christian understanding of the evolution of consciousness is often compared to the thinking of the French priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he was anxious to distinguish them.1

Teilhard's key concepts--"cosmogenesis," "homonization," the "noosphere," "omega point"--are all grounded in strict Darwinism, and Teilhard's work, Barfield finds, is through- and-through guilty of R.U.P.

See in particular Unancestral Voice, Chap. 7, Worlds Apart (in which Upwater frequently professes Teilhardian ideas), passim.
1In Worlds Apart, the biologist Upwater espouses Teilhardian ideas, as in the following speeches:
    Inorganic evolution had to rely on mechanical causes; but as soon as life appears, the principles of self-reproduction and variation which it introduces bring with them the new factor of natural selection. Moreover that was not the last major advance, as the nineteenth-century evolutionists appeared to think.

    With the appearance of consciousness, and a little later (for it is a little in terms of the whole vast process) with the growth of mind in homo sapiens an entirely new phase of evolution set in, bringing with it a new cause or method of change. Through the human properties of speech and conceptual thought the cosmic process began to reflect itself in a microcosm. At the same time, with the coming of the new technique of communication, which language-and later of course writing and printing-brought with it-the importance of purely biological evolution began to fade. For the third phase, the phase of psycho-social evolution, as it has been well called, had already begun to take its place. (30-31)

    With the development of conceptual thought-another new factor, another method of change made its appearance. The element of intention, based on the faculty of choosing between alternatives. The human mind does not only reflect the macrocosm in its system of ideas, it gives to it its whole significance, since it is only in the human mind that the process, which is reality, becomes self-conscious. It follows that, through its spearhead or growing-point of the human mind, the universe may in future influence, or perhaps-who knows?--conduct its own evolution. (32)
    Thinking, then, is the process of convergence operating in human beings to form something analogous to a new single organism of global dimensions; and I take it that this was what Teilhard de Chardin meant, when he said 'Reflection planetizes.' (34)