Colin Wilson was born in Leicester in 1931 and was educated at the Gateway School, Leicester. He left school at sixteen, and for eight years worked at a series of labouring jobs. Since the publication of his first book, The Outsider, in 1956, he has been a full-time writer. He has lectured widely in Germany, Scandinavia and America, and has been a visiting professor in America in 1966, 1967 and 1974. His many books include: Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat, The Strength to Dream, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Poetry and Mysticism, An Encyclopedia of Murder, A Casebook of Murder, Voyage to a Beginning, Order of Assassins, New Pathways in Psychology, The Craft of the Novel and The Occult. He is also the author of many novels including Ritual in the Dark, Adrift in Soho, The Glass Case, The Philosopher’s Stone and The Schoolgirl Murder Case. Colin Wilson STRANGE POWERS ABACUS edition published in 1975 by Sphere Books Ltd 30/32 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8JL First published in Great Britain by Latimer New Dimensions Ltd 1973 Copyright © 1973 Cohn Wilson (Publications) Ltd This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the pub- lisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being im- posed on the subsequent purchaser. Set in Linotype Georgian Printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd Aylesbury, Bucks Contents Introduction 7 1 Robert Leftwich 27 2 Mrs Eunice Beattie 65 3 Dr Arthur Guirdham 92 5 Introduction ‘The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that, within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning’. With these strange words, H. G. Wells began his final book Mind at the End of Its Tether, written in 1945, the year before his death. It sounded like one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ doomsday prophecies. ‘The end of everything we call life is at hand’, said Wells, ‘and cannot be evaded’. In the quarter of a century that has passed since his death, there has been no obvious sign of the ‘fundamental change’ that Wells foresaw. But no, that is not quite true. There has been a change, and a very important one: not in the conditions of life, but in the attitude of the civilised western mind to those conditions. It is a change that would have amazed Wells, and perhaps irritated him. For although Wells could not have known it, he died in the last decade before the end of scientific determinism. This determinism – the belief that the universe is basically a machine, and that life is just a highly complicated mechanical process – had reigned supreme for more than a century, and it seemed to have come to stay. Its basic attitude could be summarised like this: ‘Man has always been infin- itely capable of error and self-deception. Now he has found a method that can save him from them – the scientific method. He must clear his mind of all preconceptions, and then merely face the facts. Con- centrate entirely on facts, and on drawing rational conclusions from those facts. . . .’ It was a creed to which Wells subscribed without reservation, and he could not conceive that it might ever be changed or modified – unless the human mind should plunge again into the errors of the dark ages. It was the creed that finally led him to the 7 despair of Mind at the End of Its Tether, with its feeling that man is a hopeless, incorrigible self-deceiver who is due for a brutal awaken- ing. . . . Victorian science said man had no right to false hope; Wells said man had no right to hope at all. He was saying that the human mind is so full of its own importance that it cannot get used to the idea that it is totally unimportant; worse than unimportant – negligi- ble, almost non-existent. Wells had taken the ‘scientific attitude’ as far as it would go; the pendulum had to start swinging in the opposite direction. . . . It did – although the first signs of it would have struck Wells as absurd, a sign of decadence. I had come to London, at the age of twenty, in 1951, and I noticed, in bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, books with titles like A Buddhist Bible, The Myth of the Magus, Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa, The I Ching, In Search of the Miraculous, Worlds in Collision. Now my own training, insofar as I’d had any, had been scientific, and I was very much of Wells’ way of thinking. I understood that the scientific attitude is not basically just a spoilsport scepticism. T. H. Huxley defined the scientific atti- tude as ‘sitting down before the facts like a little child’, and following wherever they lead. And I knew that this attitude can bring an almost mystical sensation of opening vistas, a universe full of extraordinary facts, all waiting to be absorbed into the realm of human knowledge. But there are all kinds of facts and truths: historical, philosophical, literary, legal, religious, and I saw no reason to limit my interest to the kind of facts that Wells regarded as the scientist’s proper pro- vince. So I borrowed the I Ching and the Malleus Maleficarum and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and books by Montague Summers on witches and vampires from the library. And it soon struck me that there is a problem here that Wells had never taken the trouble to define. For example, Immanuel Velikovsky’s best-seller Worlds in Collision is certainly a crank book; but not because he believes that a giant comet from Jupiter caused tidal upheavals and gave rise to such phenomena as the fall of the walls of Jericho and the parting of the Red Sea to let the Israelites through. From the scientific point of view, Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos are full of interesting facts about some strange catastrophe that tore mammoths and mastodons limb from limb and then buried them in black mud, about giant boulders in the Jura mountains apparently torn from the Alps. Frozen 8