This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we 'see' is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.

A new translation of Immanuel Kant’s 1766 "Dreams of a Ghost-Seer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics" in modern American English with the original German in the back. This is Volume III in the Complete Works of Immanuel Kant from Livraria Press. Kant’s 1766 “Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik” is directed to the charlatan metaphysicians of his day, using Swedenborg's claims of spirit-visions as a central example. It is a cynical, scathing, and mocking criticism of Swedenborgian metaphysics, while simultaneously undermining the faulty Epistemology of Leibniz. Kant addresses “Mr. Schwedenberg” directly analyzes his works methodically. Carl Jung's philosophy is heavily influenced by German Transcendentalism, specifically this work as well, and continued Kant’s work of making the spiritual acceptable within a materialistic metaphysics. Kant and Hegel both articulate that the human psyche does not operate off of Presuppositional Rationalism, but Symbolism. Kant speaks of Archetypes guiding the pneumatic world. He is sketching out a response to the Aristotelian metaphysics of Hume while upholding the Scientific advances of the Enlightenment. He uses Occam’s Razor against Swedenborg, using reason to deconstruct his claims. But at the same time, he pushes back against a pure Newtonian mechanical, deterministic worldview: “For in the relations of cause and effect, of substance and action, philosophy serves at first to resolve the intricate phenomena and to bring such to simpler conceptions.” Schopenhauer wrote a much longer work modeled after this essay titled "Attempt on Spirit-Seeing and what is connected with it"