GHOSTS IN SOLID FORM
By Gambier Bolton
Ex-Pres. The Psychological Society, London, F.R.G.S., F.Z.S., etc.
CHAPTER I
"A single grain of solid fact is worth ten tons of theory."
"The more I think of it, the more I find this conclusion impressed upon me, that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to SEE something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To SEE clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one."—John Ruskin.
Working Hypothesis
That under certain known and reasonable conditions of temperature, light, etc., entities, existing in a sphere outside our own, have been demonstrated again and again to manifest themselves on earth in temporary bodies materialized from an, at present, undiscovered source, through the agency of certain persons of both sexes, termed "sensitives," and can be so demonstrated to any person who will provide the conditions proved to be necessary for such a demonstration.
Conditions
Looking back to the seven years of my life which I devoted to a careful and critical investigation of the claim made, not only by both Occidental and Oriental mystics but by well-known men of science like Sir William Crookes, Professor Alfred Russel Wallace, and others—that it was possible under certain clearly defined conditions to produce, apparently out of nothing, fully formed bodies, inhabited by (presumably) human entities from another sphere—the wonder of it still enthralls me; the apparent impossibility of so great an upheaval of such laws of Nature as we are at present acquainted with being proved clearly to be possible, will remain to the end as "the wonder of wonders" in a by no means uneventful life.