One

At the end of the second chapter of "The Soul Hunter", American science journalist Debra Bloom wrote: "One night in December 1871, Miles and Sidgwick were walking through the Cambridge campus, and the weather was very cold, the air was fresh, but it was also as bitter as ice water. Overhead, the stars were dense, and countless tiny silver flashpoints seemed so far away, so untouchable. ”

Who are Miles and Sidgivik?

Sidwick, whose full name was Henry Sidwick, was born in 1838 into a family of priests, in which the priesthood was regarded as the right path, and the highest position was a cousin, Edward White Benson, who later served as the Archbishop of Canterbury, which is the archdiocese of England, and its bishop is the head bishop of all England, recognized as the high bishop. On the night described above, Sidjvik was teaching the Department of Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge University, and was working on the Ethical Laws. Frederick Miles, a student of Sidgvik, was born in 1843 in a priest's house, was a child prodigy, wrote a sermon at the age of five, and entered Cambridge University at the age of seventeen. In 1882, the pair, who were only five years apart, would join Mr. Edmund Gaeney to form the British Society for the Study of Soul and Spirit. Born in England in 1847, Edmund Gaeney chose to study law and philosophy at Cambridge as a noble pastime, more or less as a noble pastime.

The first president of the British Society for the Study of Souls and Spirits was Sidgwick, Miles and Gaeney were responsible for the study of paranormal visions, William *** led the Transmission of Ideas Research Branch, and Nora Sidgwick, as the name suggests, was a mathematically gifted and statistician appointed to investigate ghosts. In this personnel arrangement, it is necessary to say a few words to William ***. William ***, born in 1844, a professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, whose research project was on the electromagnetism of ferroalloys, worked in the laboratory of John Tyndall, president of the British Society of Science in 1874.

It was an era of scientific prosperity, and the landmark event was around 1859, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, which challenged the myth of God's creation of the world, and caused a great debate between science and religion, the most famous of which took place in 1860 between the English naturalist Huxley and the Archbishop of Oxford. At the same time, the French chemist Louis Pasteur founded modern microbiology and invented pasteurization, the Swedish chemist Alfred Bernhard Nobel**, and the American inventor Thomas Alvar Edison invented the electric light...... New discoveries prove that the materiality of the world is like a revelation of the hidden existence of the unclear, which is all touchable, felt, and explainable, and human cognition has greatly improved, which can be called enlightenment. However, another suspicion crept in, and that is, when all existence is proved to be derived from the laws of physics, will people be happier or less happy? Because of his religious background, Siddivik was naturally inclined to believe that there was a higher will, which would instill awe in the human heart, and thus be able to restrain behavior, and this is the reason for morality. He revered and inherited his successor, Immanuel Kant, who described the awe-inspiring saying: "The sky is full of stars, and the moral law that lies within." In the "British Society for the Study of the Soul and Spirit", Sidwick was always responsible for the retreat part, that is, the construction of theory, which shows his hope for the "research society", hoping to provide him with materials to prove that there is an invisible space while there is real. In the great era of materialism, regardless of whether you believe it or not, people all obey one principle, that is, hearing is false, seeing is believing, and if you admit that there is nothing in the country, it is a retrogression.

Let's take a look at the beginning of the establishment of the "Research Society", the main creators were almost divided into two parts: one was a humanities scientist with a religious background, such as Sidgvik and Miles, and the other was a scientist, such as ***, Nora, and Nora's brother-in-law, the famous physicist Lord Rayleigh, the chemist William Crooks, the co-author of Darwin's "Theory of Evolution", the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, and so on. Interestingly, a large number of writers followed, such as Alfred Tennyson, the famous British poet laureate in the history of literature; art critic John Ruskin, whose lectures on painting, architecture, and design from 1853 to 1859 were published in 2008 by the Chinese University Press under the title "Ten Lectures on Art"; Charles Dodgson, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; American writer Mark Twain; Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf. One of the editors of the Dictionary of British Biography, the famous Bloomsbury Group will be formed around this family at the beginning of the next century...... I think these three groups of people represent three different aspirations: scientists seek truth, philosophers try to build a new mental system in the empirical world to resist moral nihilism, and writers always believe in what they want to believe, they live in the virtual, and the object of spiritual study is, in a sense, the same as the imagination.

Half a year after the founding of the British Society for the Study of Soul and Spirit, in the late autumn of 1882, an American came to London, Professor William James of Harvard University. William James, who came by medical background and then specialized in psychology, became interested in the paranormal almost at the same time as the Cambridge Spiritual Scientists. Judging from the description of "The Soul Hunter", James's family is reminiscent of the novel "The Ghost of Cantwell" by British writer Oscar Wilde. The new American minister arrives in England and lives in the historic Canterville Manor, which, like many old houses, is gloomy and haunted by a ghost. Unexpectedly, the blood stains left by the ghost were wiped clean by the son of the family with Pinkerton brand stain remover, the old housekeeper's wife, who was frightened by the ghost and was about to faint at any time, was cured of her neurasthenia by legal means of compensation, the tenant from the New World presented a bottle of Rising Sun brand lubricant to the sound of chains and shackles that sounded every night, and as for the occasional miserable laughter, it was the turn of the minister's wife, who prescribed a stomach medicine to deal with the hiccups caused by indigestion...... In short, all the tricks of this old ghost have failed in the face of the materialism of the new school of Americans. James Sr. was a wealthy atheist American, and it was not the decrepit ghost at Lord Cantville's estate who haunted him, but the Swede Wittenberg, who was born in 1688 and died in 1772. The Nordic metalsmith was a student of Isaac Newton, who discovered Newton's famous laws, and Edmund Halley, who was named after a satellite. At the time when his life was flourishing, he gave up his scientific career and entered a vain world of cult-like beliefs. He claimed to reinterpret the Bible, claiming that God had entrusted him with a prophetic mission. However, the elder James was far less fortunate than the American minister, who was able to easily deal with the ghost, and when he was a teenager, he suffered an accident that led to lifelong disability, although it was only out of reckless mischievousness, but it made him appreciate the impermanence of fate, and it was in this context that Swedenborg introduced life, which was embodied in the concept of "unpredictable" life, which kept the James family in a turbulent mood. This crude and simplistic conclusion was refined by William James's education in the sciences and humanities into a profound worldview. This worldview is Schweitenburg's correspondence theory, and in the words of "The Soul Hunter" - "there is a real connection between the material life and the spirit world in this world, and there are invisible clues that bind the inhabitants of the two worlds together." ”

When William James came to England and lived in his brother Henry James's apartment, Henry James's career as a writer was on the rise, it could be said that he was thriving, and in the days to come, he would write a novel called "The Screws Are Tightening". In the realist view of literary history, it is included in the genre of Gothic fiction in the late eighteenth century, and in the modern literary classification, it is a supernatural novel, or thriller novel. However, if we understand the kinship between Henry and William, the James brothers, and then understand the intellectual exploration of William James, and the revolutionary research of a marginal nature that took place in the British and American scientific circles at that time, we will understand what "The Screw is Tightening" really means. Henry James had an English friend, Edmund Gayney, one of the founders of the "British Society for the Study of Souls and Spirits", specializing in the field of supernatural phenomena, and Henry naturally introduced him to his brother William. This encounter not only allowed the two to find soulmates with each other, but also connected the soul studies of the United Kingdom and the United States. Three years later, in 1885, the American Society for the Study of the Soul and Spirit was founded, which, like the British Research Society, was headed by an orthodox scientist and headed by astronomer Simon Newcombe, to emphasize the spirit of mainstream science and to demonstrate that research would be conducted in an empirical way. However, this idea soon proved to be too naïve. Simon Newcombe's professional direction is to analyze and measure the movements of the sun, moon, and planets, as well as the speed of light and precession, with precision as the essence, while the biggest problem in the study of the soul and spirit is the collection of evidence, everything is done invisibly, and assumption and imagination are the main ways of inference. I think that a closer look at the composition of the two research societies in the United Kingdom and the United States can also reveal the different personalities of these two peoples. It is true that there are scientists and philosophers in the American Society, but at least from the book "Soul Hunter", it is not seen that there is a literary community like the British Society. It seems that the United States is more pure science than Britain, and there is some tendon, and the people of the New World are obviously simple-minded. Ancient Britain, on the other hand, was more romantic, more resilient, and flexible, and much more in the study of the soul. As described in Wilde's The Ghost of Cantwell, Americans are far less faithful than the British, which also indicates that the work of the American Society will experience more setbacks than the British Society.

Two

It has already been said that the evidence of the study of the soul is the greatest problem, and it is likely to cancel the whole doctrine of survival. There are so many anecdotes about those supernatural phenomena that they have been recorded and described in the pen of other writers, except for those listed in this book. The Czech poet Yaroslav Seifert's memoir "The World Is So Beautiful", which has a chapter called "The Key Under the Snow", writes that before the Second World War, the poet lived in Prague, and the courtyard of his house was locked by a large wooden door facing the street. However, on a snowy night, soft snow filled the trench and buried the key deeply. The poet, who was still a young editor at the time, had no choice but to ring the doorbell. After a few minutes, as usual, the lightest sleeper of the house, an old woman, came through the yard to open the door, and as usual complained and counted. When he entered the house and told his wife what had happened, she was horrified that the old woman had died that night and had stopped in the small drawing-room. If you want to say that the person is a poet, the poet always has a rich imagination, and it is inevitable that he will confuse the real and the false, and the real and the illusory. For example, Mark Twain's dream is specifically mentioned in "The Soul Hunter". Before he became a writer Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, a sailor, was training on a steamship on the Mississippi River with his brother Henry Clemens, and one night Samuel had a terrible dream in which his brother Henry was lying in a coffin with flowers on his chest. The dream came true three days later, when the ship's boiler exploded and Henry died, leaving him in the same place as in the dream. This accident was later included in a section of chapter 20 of his novel "On the Mississippi River" entitled "A Disaster." Mark Twain realistically described the terrible catastrophe, in which four of the eight boilers exploded and one hundred and fifty people died. At that time, the brothers parted on the Mississippi River, the younger brother was on the Pennsylvania wheel, and the older brother was on the Laser wheel, which left two days later. Along the way, he kept getting news from outside the Memphis newspaper, saying that his little brother had been spared, and that he had been wounded, this time correctly, in fact, a fatal and serious wound, and had been laid to rest in the public hall of Memphis for the time he was dying, "On the sixth night, his trance-like mind was busy thinking about something far away, and his feeble fingers scratched at his sheets. "If you think that the experience of a writer cannot be taken seriously, then what about a scientist? I personally heard an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who studied in Cambridge in his early years, studied under the Nobel Prize in Physics, specialized in genetic research, and described a past experience. When he was a child, his mother was seriously ill and was sent to live with his grandparents a few roads away. In the afternoon, the alley was very quiet, but suddenly, he felt that someone, a man, was lying beside him and said, "Why are you still naughty, your mother is no longer good!" When he looked up, there was no one else, and he got up and rushed home. A scientist whose life is based on empirical evidence should be more credible than that of an artist.

Curiosity about mysterious things is universal human nature, every child has listened to the ghost stories of the old grandmother at night, trembling all over, how to distinguish which ones are real and which are conjectures? For the pleasure of listening to the story, they would rather believe that it is true, but once they want to investigate, they are all in vain, swear and curse, and have no choice but to come up with any evidence, and finally have to let it escape into vain. Soul hunters are trying to grab the substance from the void, which sounds ridiculous and may well be fruitless, but if it is seen as a challenge to human intelligence, it cannot but admit that courage is commendable.

If this generation of spiritual researchers did leave us with some near-empirical material, two figures are crucial. One is Richard Hodgson, an Australian, a student at St John's College, Cambridge, and the other is Mrs. Leonora Evelyna Piper, wife of a small business owner in Boston. The former is a spiritual researcher, and the latter is a medium. I believe that their records must be in the collection of some important professional institution, and will be displayed at some important moment, and their appearance in this non-fiction book for the general public is somewhat tinged with literature. Born into a merchant family in Melbourne, Richard Hodgson studied law at the University of Melbourne before turning to philosophy and becoming a student of Sidgvik. His natural admiration for nature and poetry may have been the two that made Sidživik determined to lure him into the study of spirituality. The study of spirituality has an element of utopianism, or rather a romantic character, which is inevitably outrageous in the eyes of the rigorous scientific scholar. But on the other hand, it is developing into the depths of the realm of knowledge, and the materiality of existence blocks the way. Science persevers and persists in explaining and proving all phenomena as real, and the world becomes an impregnable wall, and you clearly feel that there is another invisible territory, flickering and flickering.

The attitude of the Chinese towards this false existence is much more flexible than that of Westerners, and we are more acknowledging reality and willing to put it where it should be. When it comes to abstract cognition, one must not miss it, there is Lao Zhuang in philosophy, there are different aspirations in literature, but when it is the turn of the order of reality, it is "the child is silent, the strange force is confused", and these things coexist harmoniously with the universal poetry of Chinese civil society. Therefore, that supernatural place is mostly lyrical chapters left by the Chinese. I appreciate a note by Xu Wei in the Ming Dynasty, "Remembering Dreams", writing that in a dream I came to the green mountains and valleys, saw a view, and wanted to enter, but was politely rejected by the viewer, saying that this is not your home, and then took out a book, opened it and searched it, and said: Your name is not "Wei", but "Boom". "Dream of Red Mansions" is too illusory, but it is also a big realm. The two worlds of life and death in "The Peony Pavilion" are more free and casual, with the charm of tiles and fences. In the Western dualist ideological system, this is this, the other is the other, or the other, and it is necessary to make it clear. Even in the film industry, which was born in modern times, the thrillers in it are strictly divided between humans and ghosts, unlike Chinese ghost stories, where the boundaries are quite blurred, and only one or two conditions are needed to communicate with each other.

I think that Richard Hodgson was finally moved by his teacher Sidgwick to join the "Society for the Study of the Soul and Spirit" not only out of the poet's romantic nature of fantasies, but also because of his innate materialistic spirit to turn the unknown into the known. Richard Hodgson was tasked by Sidgwick to embark on an investigative project, and the first step was to go to Mumbai, India. India is a strange place, which seems to be naturally related to the soul, and its concept of existence is broader and broader than that of the Chinese. In their world, there are no boundaries between the visible and the invisible, and anything that happens, even if it is just a flash of thought, is a fact. Therefore, Hodgson's trip to India was like a ritual that symbolized that he was on a path of no return, even though the trip itself was not rewarding. Hodgson went to Bombay specifically to meet a medium, Mrs. Blavasky, a Russian who had lived in Tibet and was said to have a psychic communion with the gods of the Himalayas. It sounded like she was the culmination of a supernatural aura, which was convincing enough for a cultist who desperately needed faith, but when it came to Hodgson, it wasn't so easy to pass. The conclusion was not long in coming: "It's a hoax through and through!"

In the decades prior to this, there had been a steady stream of psychic mediums: the Fox sisters in Hydes, N.Y., Shum, who immigrated from Edinburgh to New York, USA, and the Davenport brothers in Buffalo, who could manipulate furniture with their minds—to test their supernatural abilities, the Harvard University investigation team tied them up in a closed chamber and watched how the movement occurred. It's reminiscent of the magician Harry Hodini, escaping from his chains. This scene of magic is very terrifying, and it seems to imply that there is a cruel truth behind the scenes, such as physical destruction such as dislocation. In this book, it is written that one of the Davin Porter brothers confessed to the magician Harry Hodini about the mechanism of the so-called "special function", and Hodini launched the performance of escaping from the handcuffs in 1898, and the relationship between the two is difficult to say. All in all, the fate of these mediums is about the same, and they were first tested by spiritual researchers, and the results of the tests were mostly fruitless. I thought that on the one hand, because they themselves could not control the manifestation of their abilities, they would inevitably deceive and destroy their reputation, and on the other hand, regardless of whether it was true or not, researchers did not know what to do with them next, and how to carry out their research, so they could only let them go. Among them, there are those who are capable like Mrs. Blavaski, who have established a system of theories and organizations and become professional mediums, while more commonly end up earning money in the juggling troupe. At the same time, séances proliferated, almost becoming a social fashion, and the by-product of séances was magic, from which inspiration for form and content was derived, and many more things were created. Wallace, the aforementioned collaborator of Darwin's theory of evolution, held a séance in his house in 1875, and in an instant flowers bloomed in the living room, and we know that to this day, many magic tricks are a prosperous curtain call with a hundred flowers blooming. Hodgson, who was in a good position, teamed up with the magician Davy to hold a séance, and then revealed the truth, in an attempt to use the method of elimination to get to the bottom of the problem and sift out reliable evidence. And he no longer believes in his heart, in fact, he has never really believed that there is such a thing as an immaterial soul, and participating in research is mostly to see the face of his mentor Sidjvik. If he hadn't met a man who would have adhered to a materialistic worldview for the rest of his life, that person was Mrs. Piper.

In 1885, the study of spirituality was founded, Hodgson was entangled with Mrs. Blavasky in Bombay, and the British Society for the Study of Soul and Spirit, which had internal strife, and the dispute originated between spiritualists and scientists. This year, Mrs. Piper was twenty-six years old, and her psychic gifts were only passed down among relatives and friends, of course, there were no impermeable walls, and sometimes, people entrusted people would also receive strangers. On this day, the guest who came to ask for the conjuring was William James's mother-in-law, and in this way, a hidden psychic medium became connected with spiritual research, and thus formed a friendship with the pragmatic and hard-working Richard Hodgson.

It wasn't until two years later, in 1887, that Hodgson was sent by his teacher, Sidgwick, to Boston to help revitalize the fledgling American Society for the Study of Soul and Spirit, and one of his jobs was to meet Mrs. Piper. He is in line with the intention of cracking down on counterfeiting, which is not to subvert the study of spirituality, but to eliminate pseudo-spirituality, clear the way, and make the healthy development of spirituality. "Soul Hunter" is a tense and humorous portrayal of Hodgson's fight with Mrs. Piper, which is very dramatic. Usually the mediums have a guide, like the goddess in Chinese civil society, and in some places it is called Guan Death, once she enters the realm, she transforms into another person, and her voice and demeanor are all different. But in Guan Death, what kind of person he becomes is random, that is, he becomes the old person who asks the spirit person to see, and then answers to him. In the Anglo-American psychic medium, this role is assumed by a special person. "Mrs. Piper's 'guide' called herself French, named Dr. Finew, born in 1790 and died in 1860," and "Mrs. Piper's possession of Dr. Finewt immediately "changed from a delicate lady to a rude man." The soul researcher probably went to great lengths to find out who this Dr. Funut was, but found nothing.

On first contact, Hodgson was annoyed by this guy of unknown origin, pointing out that he was a "fake", and Finiut also became angry and announced that he would never talk to "this man" again. But it seemed that neither side could swallow this breath and decided to do another round, so Hodgson came to Mrs. Piper's house again, and Finiut apparently came prepared, bringing a message from Hodgson's deceased cousin. This time, Hodgson sat silently in his chair from beginning to end, visibly shaken. However, it was not enough to convince him, and Hodgson did not stop there. He uses detective methods to solve the case, and keeps Mrs. Piper under close surveillance. Surveillance includes tracking, checking incoming and outgoing letters, searching for social relationships. After a month of hard work, Mrs. Piper's innocence was proved, but it also angered Mrs. Piper, who felt deeply insulted. is different from those psychic mediums who come from the bottom - psychic mediums are often in the market society, living poorly, with chaotic consciousness, and the circumstances make their words and deeds vulgar and vulgar, and their credibility is very low. Mrs. Piper, on the other hand, was middle-class, educated, and well-cultivated. Things are so twists and turns, and it also fulfills an old saying of the Chinese: if you don't fight, you don't know each other, and in the end, they still form a pair of partners. At Mrs. Piper, she also looks forward to someone to help her solve the mystery of why she has such a strange endowment. As you can imagine, this endowment is not very pleasant, and it is not only frightening but also sad to get a glimpse of the privacy of so many strangers.

Psychic research, both before and since, has encountered and will encounter various psychic mediums, but none of them have Mrs. Piper's superb and stable psychic abilities, and in some ways, perhaps it is Mrs. Piper's upbringing that has helped this special function to last. She is quiet, elegant, rational, realistic, and not neurotic at all, and psychic mediums are inevitably in spirit. In the process of surveying the psychic phenomena, which was almost certainly frustrated, the presence of Mrs. Piper was buoyant to the frustration. No matter how many deceptions block the path to the netherworld, Mrs. Piper is convinced that there is still a passage through which the message of the esoteric world comes from the ethereal world, like a gossamer, if it is dark, if it is now, if it is away, it will keep us in touch.

Three

Is there a need for the study of the soul and spirit beyond the scientific and ethical motives? I don't know if this is the case, or because of the author's personal concept, we also see from "The Soul Hunter" that this research undertaking is driven by a more personal emotional experience, that is, the pain of the death of a loved one. It's hard to accept that the person next to you is suddenly gone. Where did they go? Scientific disenchantment is good, but the radical materialist is facing a greater nothingness. It's like Hodgson would have felt some relief when he got the news of his death from Mrs. Piper's guide, Dr. Finewt. This consolation shows that the séance, whether it is spiritism, is not completely boring, in addition to satisfying the curiosity of the mediocre, there is still an emotional need to a certain extent. What kind of space is that other shore where countless lives go, and what kind of relationship does it maintain with this shore? It is a huge black hole that exists. If there is even the slightest bit of information, it can make the so-called "living" people here—right? If "death" is no longer the original concept, "living" is not necessarily alive -- the so-called "living" people can probably have a more optimistic attitude towards "death." Especially when religion can no longer maintain the coherence between life and death, and theology has been demystified by empirical science, can science continue to move forward, break through barriers, and open another channel for people to look to the other side?

Edmund Gayney, one of the founders of the British Society for the Study of Souls and Spirits, and the rich boy who was in charge of the "supernatural visions" with Frederick Miles, was described in 1873 when his three sisters drowned in an accident while on a Nile cruise: "The scientists have given an incomparably precise conclusion about the finitude of life, but he does not know whether they are wrong. ”

In 1876, Frederick Miles' beloved Anne Marshall committed suicide by sinking into a lake. She was originally Miles's cousin-in-law, and when her cousin was sent to the hospital with mental illness, Miles sought medical treatment for her cousin while comforting her cousin. In the years that followed, he fell in love, married, and had children, but he never forgot Anne. In order to communicate with Anne of the underworld, he met countless mediums, but the results were always difficult to distinguish between the real and the false, and there were disappointments and encouragements, until the twentieth century when he met a new medium, Mrs. Thompson of England, who brought Miles a ghost "as bright as God". The conversation with Mrs. Thompson's mentor, "Little Nelly", was not included in the record of the investigation, and it was his personal privacy, which he kept in his possession. But he announced that Mrs. Thompson had given him a prophecy that he would meet Anne after the twentieth century.

In 1885, William James' youngest son, Hem Jr., one and a half years old, died of his mother's scarlet fever and whooping cough. As mentioned earlier, William James's mother-in-law went to see Mrs. Piper for the sake of this poor little grandson. William James could not mourn this fleeting death of his loved ones, and wrote to his friends and family: "He should have one more chance to live a better life, and surely it is now." In fact, it is the imagination of the afterlife to convince oneself and accept the sad reality. Here, the professor of philosophy at Harvard University coincides with the Chinese folk view of life and death. When it comes to children who die young, people usually tell themselves and others that he's here to lie to you! In the sequel to "Dream of Red Mansions" Gao E, Jia Baoyu abandoned his home after the last Li Jia Baoyu's scientific expedition, and his father Jia Zheng said: "How do you know that Baoyu has gone down to the earth to go through calamities, and has coaxed the old lady for 19 years!" Gao E's sequel cannot be the same as Cao Xueqin's, it is much rougher, and you can see village slang and folk customs everywhere, which I think also comes from the market. In the Chinese intellectual class, there is no religion in the strict sense, and in the ancient and remote rural society, the laws of consolation for the spirit will be born on their own, which is inevitably ugly, but the basic path is close to religion, recognizing the relative relationship between the soul and the body. William James's intellectual quest has in many ways diverged from that of the Chinese, and his Psychological Studies, which he spent twelve years working on, according to The Soul Hunter: "He even went further to put forward the more risky hypothesis of another possibility of interpersonal combinations, that is, another interpersonal relationship formed beyond the limits of physical reality that can be seen by the human eye." This is very similar to the term "fate".

In 1888, Edmund Gayney went to investigate a famous "haunted house" and died suddenly in his hotel room. The cause of death is unknown, and there is a speculation that it was an overdose of chloroform, which helps sleep. His wife thanked her friends for their condolences, and the letter read: "He will be happier now than he was when he was alive...... I think if I had never heard of the term 'immortal souls', I would have believed that he had not disappeared......" The words were subtly mocking and revealing that they were not an intimate couple. Gaini's mind is not on the worldly life, and he seems to be the name of his book, "The Phantom of the Living". Now that he has finally arrived in the underworld of his dreams, will there be some news that he will be a pioneer, and that will be the most exciting chapter of the book "The Soul Hunter".

In 1892, William James's test came again when his little sister Alice died of cancer. Before her death, Alice expressed great antipathy to the doctrine of the soul, and she said to Brother William, "I hope that the obnoxious Mrs. Piper will not say anything about my unguarded soul." "It's still a long way before spirituality comes to overcome the fear of death!

That same year, Richard Hodgson's good friend, George Peyroux, a philosophy student, fell to his death in New York's Central Park at the age of thirty-two. During his lifetime, he argued with Hodgson about the existence of a spirit world, saying that if there was such a world, and he died one step earlier, he would definitely show up to testify to spiritual research. Only young people will tell such unlucky jokes without taboos and without concealment, because they have not understood the unpredictability of fate. And this time, it happened or didn't happen, and it became a prophecy.

Five weeks after George Peyroux's death, Mrs. Piper was wandering among the flesh and soul when a new voice suddenly appeared, saying the name "George Peyroux." It was from this moment that Dr. Fineut disappeared and was replaced by G.P., Hodgson's name for the new personality, and G.P., the initials of George Peyroux's name, wished to communicate by automatic writing, and Mrs. Piper's pencil moved across the paper. Hodgson maximized his human resources to identify and test whether G.P. was really the soul of George Peyroux, such as inviting his relatives and friends to talk to him, as well as strangers, similar to the police station asking witnesses to identify him. Some extremely intimate details flowed from the tip of Mrs. Piper's pencil, and everyone was shocked, yes, it was him!The frenzy caused by the test subsided, and G.P. entered into a quiet conversation. I don't mind the objectivity of the material on which the narrative of "The Soul Hunter" is based, I am only moved by the scenes it describes, even if it is produced under the virtual cooperation of many parties—when the psychic society has already produced such complex deceptions, and when there are such incredible magic tricks, what else is there that cannot be grasped by man? The distant view of the living and the dead still reveals infinite sorrow and joy, and the dialogue goes like this-

G.P. said through Mrs. Piper's writing: "At first I couldn't tell anything. The darkest hour before dawn, you know, Jim. A friend named Jim asked, "Aren't you surprised to find that you're still alive?" and G.P. said, "Amazing." This is far beyond the ability to explain it. Now, I've figured it out, it's like seeing everything under the sun. ”

Finally, from the underworld, there are voices of cooperation, to join hands with the material world, to build a bridge between evidence and faith. As the twentieth century approached, Mrs. Thompson, the English psychic medium, her guide, her daughter who had disappeared many years ago, the little girl Nelly, had predicted that Miles would be reunited with Anne after the dawn of the new century. This medium's statement can be seen as a metaphor for the fundamental change that will take place in the twentieth century. Before Miles, who had been prophesied to cross the River Styx to the spirit realm, died on August 28, 1900. The following year, on January 17, 1901, Myers died of asphyxiation caused by pneumonia, leaving behind a fragment entitled "The Human Character and Its Survival After Physical Death," which Hodgson took over, but it seemed more like Myers had completed the discourse in his own practice. Edmund Gayney died on June 23, 1888. At this point, all the pioneers of supernatural research have passed away, and it seems to be a gathering, gathering to explore the unknown world. The people here are waiting for them to deliver the news. With the advent of G.P., this expectation is no longer absurd and whimsical.

However, things seemed to be going downhill, and in the early spring of 1905, Mrs. Piper's husband died, and due to grief or for unknown reasons, such as a change in the magnetic field, Mrs. Piper's psychic abilities decreased. G.P. even predicted that the warm meeting in Mrs. Piper's living room would not be long, just like the old Chinese saying that there is no time for a thousand long banquets. Then, one night in the middle of autumn that year, Richard Hodgson looked at the cold stars and said, "Sometimes, I can't wait to go over there." Unfortunately, once again, it's a prophecy. On 20 December, Hodgson suffered a heart attack on the field of handball. That very night, Mrs. Piper, in a quiet dream, broke into the entrance of a tunnel by a man, resembling Hodgson.

Hodgson and Mrs. Piper have worked together for many years and have become close friends, and there should be a smooth bridge between them, and sure enough, he came! Mrs. Piper's pencil wrote the following words: "I am so happy to be here, but it is too difficult." I see why Miles rarely comes out. I have to go. I couldn't stay...... "It's so sad! What kind of world is that, what kind of order is there, people are still not the same people, things are still not the same thing! Ganey, Sidgvick, Miles, and now Hodgson, they go one after another, wading into the emptiness and confusion, grabbing the invisible truth.

In that world, do things remain in their original form? Like Nora, Lady Sidgwick, one of the founding fathers of the British Society for the Study of Souls and Spirits, who, out of the rigor and rigor of orthodox science, was the first to ask, "Why are there ghosts in clothes?" If we can all accept that, as the book says, "ghosts represent the spirit of the dead, or spiritual energy", then how can we explain that things outside the body such as clothes can manifest invariably, and what kind of energy they hold in the void realm? Noraine is responsible for investigating ghosts, and she first needs to screen the objectivity of the ghosts' facts, while the ghosts in clothes are more like an illusion that is taken for granted, or accepted by the hints of life experience. As if to help answer Nora's question, the deceased began to send signals.

Lady Margaret Forun, whose husband was a professor of philosophy at Cambridge and herself a professor of classics at another college, was close to Sidgwick and Miles, and was drawn to the study of the soul, and after the death of her friend, she had the idea of connecting with the underworld. She practiced "automatic writing" on her own, and for three months, the word "Miles" suddenly appeared in the scribbled Greek and Latin. The Furun couple's daughter, Helen, is also practicing "automatic writing", and the same words appear in her pen strangely. At this time, Mrs. Piper, who was far away in Boston, USA, was not educated in Greek and Latin, and used English to "write automatically", but the content was actually intertwined with the English mother and daughter. Thus, cross-communication surfaced. What's more, in experiments with cross-communication, the psychic medium showed wisdom and education above itself, for example, Mrs. Piper's guide, who was again a new personality, the rector, who received instructions from Latin to draw a schema on paper, which was a new achievement, which in some way provided proof of the existence of the soul.

The scope of cross-communication continues to expand, as if there is a network of information radiation hidden in the world. On this day, the British Society for the Study of the Soul and Spirit received a letter from India from a woman named Alice Kipling Fleming, sister of the famous writer Rudyard Kipling. The letter said that she felt that she had psychic qualities, and that she had read Myers's book "The Human Character and Its Physical Survival After Death," which was finally completed by Hodgson, and that she had kept it a secret because she did not want to be thought of as ridiculous, but that there had been some things that had puzzled her lately. In the automatic writing of one day, the scribbled handwriting was linked into quite specific instructions, among which was the name "Miles", which was so miraculous that she sent the letter to Mrs. Furun at Cambridge. Madame Fleming did not know Madame Frun, but she automatically wrote about Madame Frun's living room as if she were a regular visitor...... It is difficult to say whether the ghosts are clothed or not, but there is one point, in that space that is not homogeneous from this realm, they seem to be free from some of the constraints of life. Their behavior deviates from their original trajectory, leaving people with the impression of drifting. They drifted to find the traces of the previous life, which reminded me of the novel "Rouge Buckle" by the ** writer Li Bihua, the ghost went to the world like a flower to find his lover Thirteen Shao, found the fifth heaven, and gradually despaired, she said: "The endless world is human", how desolate! The spiritual researcher in "The Soul Hunter" finally got in touch, and at those séances - "private jokes, intimate details, embarrassing memories ......" were so cordial, comforting the heart suffering from loss. If the soul really exists, our perception of life and death will be different, life will no longer be finite and intermittent, and the concept of happiness may change.

However, experiments with cross-communication are quite dangerous, because they do not require the constraints of existing conditions, expand the scope indefinitely, make it more difficult to obtain evidence, and become fragile along with the facts that have already been considered. Once again, Mrs. Piper has been subjected to severe scrimony by the mainstream scientific community, presided over by Stanley Hall, president of Clark University in the United States, who is an open opponent of soul studies. The conclusion of the test was: second personality disorder. Amy Tanner, assistant to President Stanley Hall, has published a new book, A Study in Spirituality, which analyzes in detail the reasons for the formation of Mrs. Piper's dual personality from the methods of modern psychology and sociology. Perhaps because of the fantastical nature of women, she left a way out for Mrs. Piper's abilities, which were that superpowers might be enhanced or diminished by illness and age.

In the eighties of the first century, Gaeney and Myers collected questionnaires, screened and screened, compiled paranormal events, and because of the huge amount of work, they recruited a third collaborator, Frank Baldmoor, a graduate student at Oxford University, to complete this strange book, The Phantom of the Living, which was published in 1886. In January 1887, William James's review was published in the mainstream scientific journal Science, and no matter how strongly it was criticized and ridiculed, it was, in retrospect, the heyday of paranormal research. The scientific and philosophical elites in their prime, working actively and high-spiritedly, the unknown world is beginning to emerge, just like seeing flowers in the fog and exploring the moon in the clouds, and when the clouds dissipate, they will not see anything. Edmund Gayney and Myers died early, and on August 19, 1910, Frank Baldmore drowned in the lake. To say, the deaths of the three authors of "Phantom of the Living" are a little weird, as if they are dyed with the phantom of the cause they have devoted themselves to.

The new president of the British Society for the Study of Soul and Spirit, Nora Sidgwick, the widow of Sidgwick, is no longer as bold as she used to be, not that she has to give up anything, but that she reiterates the principle of prudence and rigor, emphasizing that the work of the Society should be subordinated to the definition and operation of scientific research procedures.

The most credible psychic medium, Mrs. Piper, has officially announced her retirement after Principal Stanley Hall's near-torture and humiliating test.

……

Just a week after Frank Baldmore drowned, on August 26, 1910, William James died. Suddenly, gossip was everywhere, and rumors of the manifestation of William James's ghost were everywhere. In one of them, a medium's séance sent a message that sounded quite close to William James's spirit, saying, "I am calm, calm—both for me and for all of humanity." I realized that there was a new round of life, far greater than anything I could have imagined when I was an earthly mortal. Of course, it is more likely to be a fabrication by an admirer who is familiar with James's theory. The pastor of the United Church in Boston claimed that he felt the contact of James's undead, causing a "tremor of the soul." Again, this seems to be at odds with William James's worldview, in which he devoted his life to the study of the soul, provided that he abandoned the traditional religious notions of theism, and it is difficult to explain his posthumous visit to a priest. The story ends somewhat absurdly when the New York Times asks Edison for advice, and at this time, Edison is tackling a new problem, which is to turn silent movies into sound films. At this point, it is already very similar to Wilde's ghost story, "The Ghost of Cantville", in which the Americans wipe the ghosts' thousand-year-old blood with Pinkerton brand stain remover. But Edison's final answer brings the epilogue back to the main play, saying, "Our lives are too limited to comprehend everything." So far, we have not been able to grasp the true grandeur. "It seems that science, while strictly adhering to the laws of the known world, still has an attitude of reverence for the unknown. It has one sentence at a time, and it does not dare to make presumptuous claims about its existence, while literature, especially fiction, gladly takes over.