(The following text is the fourth part of chapter ten of the book "The Growth of the Soul" by Alfred Sinnett.)
We are constantly told that the manner in which the Moon rotates once on her axis in the same time that she revolves once round the Earth, is the result of tidal action in the remote past.
The satellite is assumed to have been cast off from the Earth while this was still in its early molten condition and having thus been flung into space to have settled down to its present habits as the result of tidal retardation while it was still a plastic mass.
Tidal friction is very much in favour just now among speculative physicists as an explanation of some phenomena that have taken place (in an entirely different way) and of some others (erroneously) assumed to be in preparation for the future.
As the Moon was really in existence for millions of years before the first initial measures were taken for the formation of the Earth, all guesses based upon the idea that it was a bit of the original Earth torn off by an early convulsion of Nature are little likely to find themselves in harmony with the truth.
The Moon is, indeed, a dead planet now, not because it has never been anything else, as the conventional theory would imply, but because it has fulfilled its part in the economy of the scheme to which it belonged and is in process of disintegration.
For the final return to the bosom of Nature of the materials used in the construction of a planet is accomplished by degrees, just as the planet in the beginning has been built up by degrees.
The concentric sphere arrangement is, as I infer from what I have learned, the method of planetary formation adopted throughout the solar system, but at any rate it was the method adopted in the formation of the Moon in the beginning (long before the Earth was thought about) just as in our own case afterwards.
And when the active life of the Lunar world was over and its physical body had to be dispersed again — as in the case of each one of us when each life is spent the physical body concerned has to return to dust — the outermost shells disintegrated first. As with their original construction forces are employed that we do not habitually reckon with, so in the processes of disintegration agencies of an unfamiliar kind take the work in hand, but the broad idea is that when the Spirit of the Planet that is outworn has no longer any work to do there he leaves it and decay sets in as naturally as it sets in with a human corpse when the soul has fled away.
In its full maturity, the Moon must have been a planet about the same size as our own, for as we look at it now we see the surface of what was originally its third concentric sphere going inwards.
The two outer ones have been shed, and the matter of which they were composed no doubt largely drawn upon for the final deposit of matter on the outer shell of the Earth. A long time will yet elapse before the four remaining shells arid the internal nucleus return to the oceanic store of meteoric matter, but time in these undertakings is spent by Nature with much prodigality.
NOTE
Alfred Sinnett, based on the teachings of Theosophy (that the Moon is much older than the Earth, that it was once a planet with life but is now almost dead, and that it has been shrinking), made the conjectures I listed above. However, since the original Theosophical instructors revealed almost nothing more about the Moon, I cannot tell you how true or false Sinnett's additions about the Moon are.
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