Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, philosopher, paleontologist, Jesuit priest. Vatican authorities refused to allow publication of The Phenomenon of Man in 1940 and again refused permission to publish Man's Place in Nature in 1950. Both were published in France in 1956 shortly after his sudden death in New York city in 1955. Photo by Philippe Halsman as it appears on the back cover of Man's Place in Nature published in English by Harper and Row in 1960.
Pere Teilhard wrote in the foreword to Man's Place in Nature:
Man is, in appearance, a 'species,' no more than a twig, an offshoot from the branch of the primates- but one that we find endowed with absolutely prodigious properties. Something ordinary: and yet pushed to even more than the extraordinary..."