The dark horizontal lines of the lower planes are the Upâdhis in the case of the human Principles, and the planes in the case of the Planetary Chain. Of course, as regards the Human Principles, the diagram does not place them quite in order, yet it shows the correspondence and analogy to which attention is now drawn. As the reader will see, it is a case of descent into matter, the adjustment—in both the mystic and the physical sense—of the two, and their interblending for the great coming “struggle for life” that awaits both Entities. “Entity” may be thought a strange term to use in the case of a Globe, but the ancient philosophers, who saw in the Earth a huge “animal,” were wiser in their generation than our modern geologists are in theirs; and Pliny, who called the Earth our kind nurse and mother, the only Element which is not inimical to man, spoke more truly than Watts, who fancied that he saw in her the footstool of God. For Earth is only the footstool of man in his ascension to higher regions; the vestibule— ... to glorious mansions, Through which a moving crowd for ever press. But this only shows how admirably Occult Philosophy fits every thing in Nature, and how much more logical are its tenets than the lifeless hypothetical speculations of Physical Science. Having learned thus much, the Mystic will be better prepared to understand the Occult teaching, though every formal student of Modern Science may, and probably will, regard it as preposterous nonsense. The student of Occultism, however, holds that the theory at present under discussion is far more philosophical and probable than any other. It is more logical, at any rate, than the theory recently advanced which made of the Moon the projection of a portion of our Earth, extruded when the latter was a globe in fusion, a molten plastic mass. Says Mr. Samuel Laing, the author of _Modern Science and Modern Thought_: The astronomical conclusions are theories based on data so uncertain, that while in some cases they give results incredibly short, like that of 15 millions of years for the whole past process of formation of the solar system, in others they give results almost incredibly long, as in that which _supposes the moon to have been thrown off when the earth was rotating in three hours_, while the utmost actual retardation obtained from observation would require 600 millions of years to make it rotate in twenty‐three hours instead of twenty‐four.(266) And if Physicists persist in such speculations, why should the chronology of the Hindûs be laughed at as exaggerated? It is said, moreover, that the Planetary Chains having their Days and their Nights—_i.e._, periods of activity or life, and of inertia or death—behave in heaven as do men on earth: they generate their likes, grow old, and become personally extinct, their spiritual principles only living in their progeny as a survival of themselves.