present day, though on a far larger scale. As the time drew near when the
planets would be required for the purposes of evolution, the Deity sets up
somewhere in the thickness of each ring a subsidiary vortex into which a
great deal of the matter of the ring was by degrees collected. The
collisions of the gathered fragments caused a revival of the heat, and the
resulting planet was for a long time a mass of glowing gas. Little by
little it cooled once more, until it became fit to be the theatre of life
such as ours. Thus were all the planets formed.

Almost all the matter of those interpenetrating worlds was by this time
concentrated into the newly formed planets. Each of them was and is
composed of all those different kinds of matter. The earth upon which we
are now living is not merely a great ball of physical matter, built of the
atoms of that lowest world, but has also attached to it an abundant supply
of matter of the sixth, the fifth, the fourth and other worlds. It is well
known to all students of science that particles of matter never actually
touch one another, even in the hardest of substances. The spaces between
them are always far greater in proportion than their own size--enormously
greater. So there is ample room for all the other kinds of atoms of all
those other worlds, not only to lie between the atoms of the denser matter,
but to move quite freely among them and around them. Consequently, this
globe upon which we live is not one world, but seven interpenetrating
worlds, all occupying the same space, except that the finer types of matter
extend further from the centre than does the denser matter.

We have given names to these interpenetrating worlds for convenience in
speaking of them. No name is needed for the first, as man is not yet in
direct connection with it; but when it is necessary to mention it, it may
be called the divine world. The second is described as the monadic, because
in it exist those Sparks of the divine Life which we call the human Monads;