d not
mislead us unless we allow ourselves to think of the tiny fragment
which is all that we can see as though it were the perfect whole. If
we are careful that such conceptions as we may form shall be accurate
as far as they go, we shall have nothing to unlearn, though much to
add, when in the course of our further progress we gradually acquire
the higher wisdom. Be it understood then at the commencement that a
thorough grasp of our subject is an impossibility at the present stage
of our evolution, and that many points will arise as to which no exact
explanation is yet obtainable, though it may often be possible to
suggest analogies and to indicate the lines along which an explanation
must lie.

Let us then try to carry back our thoughts to the beginning of this
solar system to which we belong. We are all familiar with the ordinary
astronomical theory of its origin--that which is commonly called the
nebular hypothesis--according to which it first came into existence as
a gigantic glowing nebula, of a diameter far exceeding that of the
orbit of even the outermost of the planets, and then, as in the course
of countless ages that enormous sphere gradually cooled and
contracted, the system as we know it was formed.

Occult science accepts that theory, in its broad outline, as correctly
representing the purely physical side of the evolution of our system,
but it would add that if we confine our attention to this physical
side only we shall have a very incomplete and incoherent idea of what
really happened. It would postulate, to begin with, that the exalted
Being who undertakes the formation of a system (whom we sometimes
call the Logos of the system) first of all forms in His mind a
complete conception of the whole of it with all its successive chains
of worlds. By the very act of forming that conception He calls the
whole into simultaneous objective existence on the plane of His
thought--a plane of course far above all those of which we know
anything--from which the various globes descend when required into
whatever state of further objectivity may be respectively destined for
them. Unless we constantly bear in mind this fact of the real
existence of the whole system from the very beginning on a higher
plane, we shall be perpetually misunderstanding the physical evolution
which we see taking place down here.

But occultism has more than this to teach us on the subject. It tells
us not only that all this wonderful sys