Edmund Gurney

Edmund Gurney (23 March 1847 – 23 June 1888) was an English psychologist and psychic researcher.

He was born at Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames. He was educated at Blackheath and at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1866, where he took fourth place in the classical tripos and obtained a fellowship in 1872. His work for the tripos was done, said his friend F. W. H. Myers, in the intervals of his practice on the piano. Dissatisfied with his own executive skill as a musician, he wrote The Power of Sound (1880), an essay on the philosophy of music.

He then studied medicine with no intention of practising, devoting himself to physics, chemistry and physiology. In 1880 he passed the second M.B. Cambridge examination in the science of the healing profession. In 1881 he began the study of law at Lincoln's Inn.

In relation to Psychical Research, he asked whether there is an unexplored region of human faculty transcending the normal limitations of sensible knowledge. Gurney's purpose was to approach the subject by observation and experiment, especially in the hypnotism field. He wanted to investigate the persistence of the conscious human personality after the death of the body.

Gurney began at what he later saw was the wrong end by studying, with Myers, the séances of professed spiritualistic mediums (1874–1878). Little but detection of imposture came of this. In 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was founded. Paid mediums were discarded, at least for the time, and experiments were made in thought-transference and hypnotism. Personal evidence as to uninduced hallucinations was also collected.

The first results are embodied in the volumes of Phantasms of the Living, a vast collection (Frank Podmore, Myers and Gurney), and in Gurney's essay, Hallucinations. Evidence for the process called telepathy was supposed to be established by the experiments chronicled in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and it was argued that similar experiences occurred spontaneously, as, for example, in the many recorded instances of deathbed wraiths. The dying man was supposed to convey the hallucination of his presence as one living person experimentally conveys his thought to another, by thought-transference.

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