historian G.R. Searle described Myers as "having lost his Christian faith, sought a new kind of religion that could reassure him that death did not lead to extinction." Mediums and psychics In opposition to Richard Hodgson and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick who held the view that many physical mediums were fraudulent, Myers believed that although many of these mediums cheated they could also produce genuine physical phenomena. According to Trevor Hamilton "Myers had no direct involvement in the exposure of physical fraud." In the late 19th century Douglas Blackburn and George Albert Smith were endorsed as genuine psychics by Myers and Edmund Gurney. Smith even became an SPR member himself and the private secretary to the Honorary Secretary Gurney from 1883 to 1888. However, Blackburn later confessed to fraud. Blackburn called Gurney and Myers a "couple of credulous spiritualists" and wrote "we resolved that we should be doing the world a service by fooling them to the top of their bent, and then showing how easy a matter it was to 'take in' scientific observers." Myers' 1884 essay Visible Apparitions with Gurney claimed a "personal experience" by a retired Judge Edmund Hornby involving a visitation from a spirit was true, but Joseph McCabe wrote that the story was a "jumble of inaccuracies" and "Sir E. Hornby was compelled to admit, that the story was entirely untrue." In July 1895, Eusapia Palladino was invited to England to Myers' house in Cambridge for a series of investigations into her mediumship. According to reports by the investigators such as Richard Hodgson and magician John Nevil Maskelyne, all the phenomena observed in the Cambridge sittings were the result of trickery. Her fraud was so clever, according to Myers, that it "must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of skill." However, despite the exposure of her fraud, Myers was convinced some of her phenomena was genuine. Clinical neurologist Sebastian Dieguez has commented that Myers "was seriously duped by many people". Phantasms of the living Myers was the co-author of the two-volume Phantasms of the Living (1886) with Gurney and Frank Podmore which documented alleged sightings of apparitions. Myers wrote an introduction and concluding chapter. The two volumes consist of 701 cases of alleged spontaneous apparitional communications. It also explored a telepathic theory to explain such cases. Psychical researcher Thomas Walker Mitchell commented that "the chief aim of [the] book was to