The Master Key to the Nebular Theory

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages with a contents page and central ideas at the front. Like Is the Sun a Mere Cooling Mass? in this same series, it is a reply to a question put by F.W.H. Myers arising from Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism — the two files are companions and are best read together.

The nebular theory is not rejected but reinterpreted, and the image used to do it is a homely one. The cloud of dust and gas between the stars is described as the storehouse of the materials from which new stars and planets are produced — like bricks already baked, of various qualities, shapes and colours, which are no longer formless clay but have become fit units of a future wall. On that reading, star-clusters are destroyed by the architects of the visible universe in order to be rebuilt and fashioned into new worlds, which turns the destruction the astronomers observe into a stage of manufacture. A second claim narrows the scope of terrestrial physics: the matter within our solar system is said to be in an entirely different state from matter outside or beyond it, so that conclusions drawn here need not travel. The most interesting section is on dimension, and it takes the sceptic's side before turning. Since the three dimensions of length, breadth and thickness belong only to one characteristic of matter — extension — common sense justly rebels at the suggestion that there could be more than three. What is proposed instead is not a fourth dimension of space at all but a sixth characteristic of matter, the harbinger of a sixth sense, on whose awakening the septenary constitution of space would become visible. Until then, the file says, the astronomer's puzzle will continue, because his concepts have not yet reached the natural dimensions of visible and invisible space in their septenary completeness. The closing pages return to the position stated across this whole series: that gravity, as the summit of the materialists' imponderables, is an obsolete law in the starry heaven.

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