must admit that my attitude was basically sceptical. As a child I had been fascinated by spiritualism, ghosts and magic, and had devoured all the books in the ‘occult’ section of our local library, from poltergeists to voodoo. But around the age of eleven my mother presented me with a chemistry set and an uncle produced a book on astronomy, and I fell under the spell of the potent magic of science. Suddenly the ‘occult’ seemed absurd and slightly disgusting. Later on, when I decided I wanted to become a writer rather than a scientist, my attitude became less censorious and I began to experience a certain nostalgia for the interests of childhood — such as murder and the supernatural. At twenty-four, as the author of a successful book, I once again began to accumulate a library on the ‘supernatural’. But I was inclined to treat it as light summer reading. I had no doubt whatever that most ‘occultists’ are indulging in pure wishful thinking.
As I began to study the subject systematically this attitude soon changed. I was struck first of all by the impressive consistency of reports of telepathy, ‘second sight’ and precognition. If they were really lies or delusions they ought to possess as much variety as a shelf-full of novels: in fact, they all sounded remarkably similar. The same was true of reports of magic and contact with ‘spirits’: you would expect to find very little in common between the beliefs of an African witch-doctor, an Eskimo shaman and a Siberian medicine-man. In fact they are practically interchangeable. Invented ghost stories — by writers like Dickens or M. R. James — are full of a most weird diversity of occurrences; real ghost stories all sound alike. It was soon obvious to me that I was not studying a subject full of imaginative inventions or impostures, but a fairly narrow range of facts, just as in astronomy or cybernetics. As a result I soon became convinced that the evidence for poltergeists, premonitions and second sight is as sound as the evidence for atoms and electrons. I wrote in
The Occult
, ‘I sympathize with the philosophers and scientists who regard it as emotional nonsense, because I am temperamentally on their side: but I think they are closing their eyes to evidence that would convince them if it concerned the mating habits of albino rats or the behaviour of alpha particles.’
For someone trained as a scientist, the domain of the paranormal was like travelling to a foreign country. I found myself in a strange and exciting world that was also reassuringly consistent. It could be explored exactly like a foreign country, by wandering around and studying what was to be seen. Admittedly parts of it had to be treated with suspicion, like any modern tourist trap. But in deciding what to believe and what not to believe I applied exactly the same standards that I would apply in science. If something had been observed independently by a number of trustworthy observers, then I was inclined to accept it as fact. But some of these facts certainly left me feeling baffled. For example, a German doctor named Justinus Kerner spent three years studying a ‘psychic’ lady called Friederike Hauffe and had no doubt whatever that she could read a book that was placed, face downwards, against her bare stomach. By any normal scientific standards that sounds absurd; yet it was observed many times by nineteenth-century investigators. Professor Cesare Lombroso, a confirmed scientific ‘materialist’, studied a girl who could see through her ear and smell through her chin. The possibility that she was cheating vanished entirely when her sense of smell transferred itself to the back of her foot: if pleasant smells were brought close to her heel, she smiled, while unpleasant ones made her react with disgust. Lombroso also came across the case of a girl who developed X-ray vision and asserted that she could see worms in her intestines — she counted thirty-three. Under treatment she
As I began to study the subject systematically this attitude soon changed. I was struck first of all by the impressive consistency of reports of telepathy, ‘second sight’ and precognition. If they were really lies or delusions they ought to possess as much variety as a shelf-full of novels: in fact, they all sounded remarkably similar. The same was true of reports of magic and contact with ‘spirits’: you would expect to find very little in common between the beliefs of an African witch-doctor, an Eskimo shaman and a Siberian medicine-man. In fact they are practically interchangeable. Invented ghost stories — by writers like Dickens or M. R. James — are full of a most weird diversity of occurrences; real ghost stories all sound alike. It was soon obvious to me that I was not studying a subject full of imaginative inventions or impostures, but a fairly narrow range of facts, just as in astronomy or cybernetics. As a result I soon became convinced that the evidence for poltergeists, premonitions and second sight is as sound as the evidence for atoms and electrons. I wrote in
The Occult
, ‘I sympathize with the philosophers and scientists who regard it as emotional nonsense, because I am temperamentally on their side: but I think they are closing their eyes to evidence that would convince them if it concerned the mating habits of albino rats or the behaviour of alpha particles.’
For someone trained as a scientist, the domain of the paranormal was like travelling to a foreign country. I found myself in a strange and exciting world that was also reassuringly consistent. It could be explored exactly like a foreign country, by wandering around and studying what was to be seen. Admittedly parts of it had to be treated with suspicion, like any modern tourist trap. But in deciding what to believe and what not to believe I applied exactly the same standards that I would apply in science. If something had been observed independently by a number of trustworthy observers, then I was inclined to accept it as fact. But some of these facts certainly left me feeling baffled. For example, a German doctor named Justinus Kerner spent three years studying a ‘psychic’ lady called Friederike Hauffe and had no doubt whatever that she could read a book that was placed, face downwards, against her bare stomach. By any normal scientific standards that sounds absurd; yet it was observed many times by nineteenth-century investigators. Professor Cesare Lombroso, a confirmed scientific ‘materialist’, studied a girl who could see through her ear and smell through her chin. The possibility that she was cheating vanished entirely when her sense of smell transferred itself to the back of her foot: if pleasant smells were brought close to her heel, she smiled, while unpleasant ones made her react with disgust. Lombroso also came across the case of a girl who developed X-ray vision and asserted that she could see worms in her intestines — she counted thirty-three. Under treatment she
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