t
casual glance that many of the terrestrial arrangements of nature
which affect us most nearly have not been designed exclusively with a
view to our comfort or even our ultimate advantage, it was yet
probably unavoidable that the human race, at least in its childhood,
should imagine that this world and everything it contains existed
solely for its own use and benefit. Undoubtedly we ought by this time
to have grown out of that infantile delusion and realized our proper
position and the duties that attach to it; that most of us have not
yet done so is shown in a dozen ways in our daily life notably by the
atrocious cruelty habitually displayed towards the animal kingdom
under the name of sport by many who probably consider themselves
highly civilized people. Of course the veriest tyro in the holy
science of occultism knows that all life is sacred, and that without
universal compassion there is no true progress; but it is only as he
advances in his studies that he discovers how manifold evolution is,
and how comparatively small a place humanity really fills in the
economy of nature. It becomes clear to him that just as earth, air and
water support myriads of forms of life which, though invisible to the
ordinary eye, are revealed to us by the microscope, so the higher
planes connected with our earth have an equally dense population of
whose existence we are ordinarily completely unconscious. As his
knowledge increases he becomes more and more certain that in one way
or another the utmost use is being made of every possibility of
evolution, and that wherever it seems to us that in nature force or
opportunity is being wasted or neglected, it is not the scheme of the
universe that is in fault, but our ignorance of its method and
intention.

For the purposes of our present consideration of the non-human
inhabitants of the astral plane it will be best to leave out of
consideration those very early forms of the universal life which are
evolving, in a manner of which we can have little comprehension,
through the successive encasement of atoms, molecules and cells: for
if we commence at the lowest of what are usually called the elemental
kingdoms, we shall even then have to group together under this general
heading an enormous number of inhabitants of the astral plane upon
whom it will be possible to touch only very slightly, as anything like
a detailed account of them would swell this manual to the dimensions
of an encyclopaed