" Kierkegaard wrote of “eternal consciousness”; the French sociologist Émile Durkheim of “collective consciousness”; the British writer H. G. Wells of a “world brain”; the French philosopher Edouard Le Roy of the “noosphere”—which the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called a “new skin” on the earth. "

― James Carroll , Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age