My Library

Though it might have been thought fairly obvious, even to the most casual glance, that mjnv 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; but 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 sho\vn 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 proba!bly consider themselves highly civilized people. Of course the veriest tyro in the holy scienqp 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