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the ability that enabled Mark Bredin to ‘know’ that his taxi would be struck by another taxi is closely related to the ability of Zerah Colburn and Sacks’s twins, and that both are related to T E Lawrence’s feeling on the morning when ‘the senses awoke before the intellect’.
    Now, long before I became interested in ‘the occult’, I had been fascinated by another example of the powers that lie ‘below the iceberg’. (I say ‘below the iceberg’ rather than ‘below the visible part of the iceberg’ because it has always seemed to me that man’s hidden powers are located in the sea below the iceberg as much as in the iceberg itself.) As everyone knows, Proust’s vast novel
À la recherche du temps perdu
sprang from a single incident in his childhood, just as Graves’s theories in
The White Goddess
sprang from his experience behind the cricket pavilion. One day, feeling tired and depressed, Proust’s hero is offered by his mother a small cake (called a madeleine) dipped in herb tea. As he tastes it he experiences an exquisite sensation of sheer happiness. ‘I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.’ After eating another bite, he recalls what has caused this feeling of power and happiness: the madeleine has revived memories of his childhood in a small country town called Combray, where his Aunt Leonie used to give him a taste of her own madeleine dipped in the same herb tea.
    Why should this make him feel so happy? Because it has reminded him of the depths below the iceberg. He had been feeling bored and depressed — in other words, superficial. Now he catches a glimpse of the depths of his own mind, and of its hidden powers. He also realizes that if only he could learn the ‘trick’ of bringing back this feeling, he would never be unhappy again. This is why he sets out to revive it by writing his enormous autobiographical novel. Yet this deliberate intellectual activity fails. When he catches other glimpses of this magical feeling of power and strength, it is always by accident, when he is thinking of something else.
    In the tenth volume of his
A Study of History
, Arnold Toynbee describes several occasions on which he also had these strange glimpses into the reality of the past — not his own past, but that of history. On each of these occasions, he actually seemed to see the past, as if he had been transported by a time machine. On one of these occasions, he seemed to see the battle of Pharsalus, which had taken place in 197 bc , and saw some horsemen — of whose identity he was ignorant — galloping away from the massacre. It seems clear from his descriptions that he felt this was not ‘imagination’, but some kind of glimpse of the past like Mark Bredin’s glimpse of the future. (In
Beyond the Occult
I cite many other examples of more distant ‘glimpses’ of the future which proved to be accurate.)
    On a snowy day in Washington in 1966, thinking about this curious ability to ‘make real’ other times and other places, I labelled it ‘Faculty X’. But Faculty X should not be regarded as some ‘paranormal’ faculty. It is simply the opposite of that feeling of being ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’, which all of us feel when we are tired and depressed, and which Sartre calls ‘contingency’. And whenever Faculty X awakens, it tells us that we are not contingent, not mediocre, accidental, mortal. Our powers are far greater than we realize.
    In
The Occult
, I had pointed out that animals seem to possess all kinds of ‘paranormal’ powers. The wife of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid told me that her dog knows when her husband will return from a long journey, and goes and sits at the end of their lane several days before he arrives. On one occasion, the dog knew he was going to return before he did — circumstances had caused him to make a sudden decision to return home.
    In his book
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
, the tiger hunter Jim Corbett describes how he came to