The Solar System

By Arthur E. Powell (1882 - 1969).

371 Pages | First published in 1930, first edition, third reprint 2015 | Hardcover | Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar | ISBN: 9788170594314.

The Solar System offers a comprehensive picture of the streams of life, passing from stage to stage of development to the level of humanity and beyond. This valuable work is the last of a series of books by the same author, that present a coherent and sequential account of the finer bodies of the human being and its role in the scheme of evolution. It was preceded by The Etheric Double - The Health Aura, The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena, The Mental Body and The Causal Body and the Ego.

Human evolution takes place as the Soul experiences birth in different races and civilizations. The vast panorama presented here and the details of the human constitution contained in the rest of the series, awaken insight into the glorious nature of the cosmic process and the great future awaiting humanity on its pilgrimage towards the Eternal.

From the Introduction: (p. xvii, p. xviii & p. xix):

" Up to the present, however, no one book has appeared covering the whole of this vast ground [of the Solar System], describing both the 'field' of evolution and the streams of life, which evolve in it as the ages roll by. The present Volume is therefore attempt to fill this need.

[...]

1. The work is planned in three main sections. First, the field, in which evolution takes place, is described. This involves a study of the various globes, their successive periods of activity and obscuration, the chains and schemes of evolution. It is the form-side of our subject, a description of the places where life evolves.

2. The second section deals with the various streams of life, which are poured into the prepared field, and the method by which those streams steadily evolve and pass through the various stages or levels of attainment or growth. These processes are here dealt with in broad outline only, giving the student a bird's-eye view of the whole stately march of events.

3. The third section describes in much more detail the progress of the component parts of certain of the kingdoms of life, more especially the human races and subraces. In this section, however, as already stated, full elaboration of detail is avoided, the object being, not so much to give the student an encyclopaedic mass of in-formation, as to enable him to perceive and understand the principles determining the mighty plan in obedience to which everything is ordered in this superbly ordered universe, in which 'not a sparrow falls on the ground' save by the Will of the Father of the System to which we have the honour to belong. "