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1971, I had no doubt whatever that I was dealing with scientific actualities and not with the delusions of muddle-headed spiritualists. Even that most baffling of all paranormal faculties, precognition — the ability to glimpse the future — was so exhaustively documented that there could be no possible doubt that it occurs again and again. So I arrived at the reasonable conclusion that human beings possess a whole range of ‘hidden powers’ of which they are usually unaware, and that these include telepathy, ‘second-sight’, precognition and psychometry. It seemed fairly obvious that our ancestors possessed these faculties to a far higher degree, and that we have gradually lost them because we no longer need them. This seemed to be illustrated by the case of the Dutch ‘clairvoyant’ Peter Hurkos, who became aware of his powers as a result of an accident during the Second World War in which he fell off a ladder and cracked his skull. As he began to recover in hospital he found that he ‘knew’ things about his fellow patients simply by looking at them — for example, that the patient in the next bed had sold a gold watch left to him by his father. But this was not simply telepathy, for when Hurkos shook hands with a patient who was about to leave he suddenly ‘knew’ that the man was a British agent and that he would be killed shortly. This insight almost cost him his life, for the Dutch Resistance assumed that Hurkos was working for German intelligence and it was only with the utmost difficulty that he convinced them that he possessed genuine powers of clairvoyance.
    But the most interesting point about the case of Hurkos is that after he left hospital he could not work at any normal job because he was unable to concentrate. It was not until he stumbled upon the idea of using his newly-discovered powers as a stage ‘magician’ that he was again able to start supporting himself and his family. This reveals clearly why man has suppressed his ‘psychic’ abilities; they involve a kind of mental receptivity, an ‘openness’ that would make him far less efficient at everyday living.
    As I wrote
The Occult
I experienced the pleasurable excitement of someone who sees fact after fact fall neatly into place — I imagine Newton must have felt something of the sort as he wrote the
Principia
. And this was the example that was at the back of my mind in writing
The Occult
and its sequel
Mysteries
. It was breathtaking to realize that so many of the things I had regarded as superstitious absurdities had a sound basis in fact. And if they were factual then they could be incorporated into some sort of scientific framework. And since I had started life as a scientist — my first book, written at the age of thirteen, had been a seven-volume
Manual of General Science
— it seemed a reasonable assumption that I might be the right person to do it.
    And indeed, when I came to re-read the book in proof, I had a satisfying sensation of having created a comprehensive theory that explained the existence of paranormal faculties from a scientific viewpoint. It was as rigorous and logical as I could make it, and I felt that no one could accuse me of being credulous or gullible. The book had considerable success, and it was pleasant to walk into a big department store in my home town and see a whole rack devoted to copies of the paperback. But even by that time I had begun to be troubled by doubts. The more I learned about the paranormal the more I saw I was being absurdly optimistic in believing that I had covered all the basic facts. It was true that the unconscious mind seemed to provide a fairly convincing explanation for telepathy, clairvoyance and psychometry. But it hardly seemed adequate to explain some of the highly convincing evidence for life after death, and even for reincarnation. And it totally failed to explain the experience of my musician friend who was travelling in a taxi along the Bayswater Road when he