Psychic Self-Defence

Fortune opens not with ghosts but with a claim about how the world is built. Atoms, she says, do not arrange themselves into living tissue by their own nature. Something organises them, and that something is not physical. "We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive."

She calls this the mind-side of nature, and she sees three kinds of traffic in it. Some beings live there "as fish live in the sea". Trained people can enter it the way a diver goes down to the ocean-bed. And sometimes, like a low country when the sea-dykes break, it floods in on ordinary lives.

Normally none of this touches you, and the reason is almost comic: our very incapacity to perceive is the protection. The dyke is our own dullness, and most of the time it holds.