Edmund Gurney

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Edmund Gurney (1847–1888) was an English psychologist and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 by a largely Cambridge circle to examine reports of telepathy, apparitions, and trance under the standards of evidence then governing the natural sciences. Among the early investigators he was the one who did the heaviest experimental and documentary labor — by one accounting the first man to make psychical research a full-time occupation rather than an avocation — and his death at forty-one was the first great loss the young society sustained.

Gurney came to the work by a long detour, and the detour is the key to him. He was born on 23 March 1847 at Hersham in Surrey, a younger son of the Reverend John Hampden Gurney, a prominent evangelical preacher and rector at Marylebone, and connected to the wider Gurney family of Quaker bankers and reformers; he never had to earn his keep, and the freedom of independent means let him spend two decades looking for a vocation he could believe in rather than one he could merely fill. That same independence is part of why, when he found the work at last, he could give it the unhurried, full-time labor it demanded and few others could afford. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1866, took a high place in the classical tripos, and was elected to a Trinity fellowship in 1872. None of it held him. He turned first to music, studying performance and theory with an intensity that outran his own executive gift; dissatisfied as a player, he redirected the passion into thought and produced The Power of Sound (1880), a long and original treatise on musical aesthetics that tried to ask, in something like a scientific temper, what music is, how it moves the body and the feelings, and whether its power can be told apart from the ideas and pictures it suggests. It remains among the more serious nineteenth-century attempts at a philosophy of music. When music did not settle him he resigned the fellowship in 1877, married Kate Sara Sibley that June, and took up medicine — reading at Cambridge and at University College London and qualifying far enough to handle a physiological literature with confidence — and then read for the bar. He completed nothing into a career. The collected essays of Tertium Quid (1887) catch the cast of mind that this restlessness expressed: a refusal of the forced choice, a search for the third thing standing between two settled positions.

The third thing he finally found was psychical research, and he was drawn into it through the friendships formed at Cambridge — with the classicist and poet Frederic Myers and with the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the circle, later joined by Sidgwick’s wife Eleanor, that would form the society’s core. The motive was not credulity but bereavement and doubt. These were people for whom the Victorian collision between religious faith and scientific naturalism was a personal crisis rather than a debating topic; having lost the consolations of inherited belief, and unwilling to accept them back on authority, they hoped that the oldest of the questions left unanswered — whether anything of a person outlasts the body — might be reopened not by creed and not by séance-room enthusiasm but by evidence weighed as a physicist or a physiologist would weigh it. Gurney’s own temperament gave the hope a darker undertow: a man preoccupied with suffering and its meaning, he brought to the inquiry less a wish to be reassured than a need to know.

The Society and its method

The Society for Psychical Research was formally constituted in February 1882, with Sidgwick as its first president and the physicist William Barrett as its prime mover; its stated purpose was to investigate the disputed phenomena — thought-transference, mesmeric and trance states, apparitions, the physical effects reported in the séance room — in the same exact and unimpassioned spirit as the recognized sciences, and explicitly to suspend rather than assert the spirit hypothesis. That suspension split the society from the broader Spiritualist movement out of which several of its members came, and it set the temper Gurney embodied more fully than anyone: collect, classify, doubt, and let the residue rather than the hope decide. He became editor of the society’s Proceedings from 1883 and the chief engine of its early output, corresponding with witnesses, cross-examining testimony, and building the case files by the hundred.

The working vocabulary of the field was shifting as he entered it. The older phrase was thought-transference, or thought-reading; in 1882 Myers proposed the word telepathy — built from the Greek for distance and for feeling — to gather a wider class of impressions, not articulate thoughts only, under a single neutral term, and it is Myers’s coinage that survived where Myers’s companion coinage, telaesthesia, did not. The inheritance ran back through the mesmerists: the “rapport” and “community of sensation” reported between a magnetizer and his entranced subject, traceable to Franz Anton Mesmer and his successors, was the immediate proto-telepathy the society set out to test under controlled conditions.

Phantasms of the Living

His major monument is Phantasms of the Living, the two-volume work of 1886 written with Myers and Frank Podmore, of which Gurney composed by far the larger part — the introduction and analytic machinery, the chapters on hypnotism and on the transference of mental pictures and feelings, the dream and hallucination cases, and the long argument that ties them together. It gathered and assessed more than seven hundred reported cases in which a person seemed to perceive a distant friend or relative at the moment of that person’s death or grave crisis — the “crisis apparition,” the wraith or fetch of older folk belief recast as a psychological event. Gurney’s wager was that such experiences, if their testimony could be cleaned of error, were evidence of telepathy: that a mind in extremity could impress an image upon a distant mind, which the receiving mind then dressed as a hallucination.

The interest of the book lies less in the conclusion than in the apparatus built to defend it. Gurney would not take a story on its face. He demanded that the percipient’s account be recorded, where possible, before the confirming news arrived; he weighed the interval between vision and death; he interrogated memory, suggestion, exaggeration, and the human tendency to forge a coincidence after the fact; and above all he tried to ask whether the mass of well-attested cases exceeded what chance alone, across a population of dreamers and worriers, would be expected to throw up. This was source-criticism and a rough statistics of the improbable applied to material no one had handled so severely before, and it set the methodological bar for the society’s later and larger Census of Hallucinations. Contemporary critics, and many since, answered that the foundation was sand — that testimony recalled after the event, however honestly given, is too frail to carry an inference of this magnitude, and that no sifting can extract a clean signal from sources contaminated at the source. Gurney knew the objection and met it not by denying the frailty but by trying to quantify it, which is itself part of why the work outlived its conclusions. The care shows in the cautions he wrote into the method: he distrusted any case where the percipient had reason to expect the death, threw out reports softened or sharpened by retelling, and treated a single corroborated narrative as worth more than a crowd of vivid ones. The instinct that a claim is only as strong as the record made before the confirming event — and that the burden falls on the collector, not the witness — is the part of Phantasms that reads least like its period and most like later evidence science.

Hypnotism, dissociation, and the durable work

Alongside the apparition cases Gurney ran a sustained program of experiments on hypnotism, and this laboratory side is now judged his most durable contribution. He examined suggestion, anesthesia, and post-hypnotic action; he investigated what he read as thought-transference passing between operator and entranced subject; and in the course of it he produced findings that anticipated the experimental psychology then taking shape. He conducted the first large-scale survey of hallucinations occurring in the otherwise sane, treating them as a normal-range phenomenon to be counted rather than a symptom to be pathologized. And in his hypnotic work he gathered some of the earliest experimental evidence for what would later be called dissociation — that a hypnotized subject could sustain a stream of mental activity, registering and acting on information, split off from the consciousness that answered the operator. Pierre Janet in France was moving toward the same finding by another road. Gurney’s hallucination and hypnotism research was taken up in its day by William James and by Alfred Binet, naturalized into the new psychology, and only later marginalized as the discipline drew a firm boundary around itself and pushed the contested questions his findings were entangled with outside it. The irony is exact: the same investigator whose apparition cases the laboratory would learn to dismiss had, in the next room, done laboratory work the laboratory could use, and the two halves of his output were divided from each other not by their rigor but by the company they kept.

The hypnotism experiments carried the flaw that would shadow his memory. For the Brighton trials Gurney relied on a single skilled operator, George Albert Smith, a young mesmeric performer — later an SPR secretary, and later still a pioneer of early cinema — whose stagecraft made him an ideal instrument and, it turned out, an unreliable one. Smith had earlier produced striking “telepathic” drawing- and number-transmissions with the journalist Douglas Blackburn; in 1908, and again in 1911, Blackburn publicly declared the whole of that earlier corpus a deliberate hoax worked by codes and the reading of involuntary cues. Smith denied it to the end, and the confession touched the Blackburn material directly rather than the later Brighton series. But the suspicion spread, and it raised the unanswerable question of whether the operator on whom Gurney’s most careful results depended had been deceiving him as well.

The death in Brighton

Gurney died at the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton on 23 June 1888. He had gone down from London suddenly, alone, after receiving a letter whose contents he did not disclose; he was found the next morning dead in his bed with a chloroform- soaked pad over his nose and mouth. He had used chloroform against the facial neuralgia and the insomnia that plagued him, and the inquest returned a verdict of accidental death. Whether it was accident or suicide has never been established, and the question has attached itself to his memory ever since. Long afterward the historian Trevor Hall, in The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney (1964), pressed the darkest reading: that in the spring of 1888 Gurney had discovered Smith’s deceptions, understood that the experiments on which he had staked his reputation might be worthless, and killed himself in the disillusion. The thesis is one construction of a thin record, contested by historians who note how much it must assume; what it cannot be is proven. The facts that remain are a chronic sufferer, a habitual drug, a sudden journey, and a sealed letter.

Sources and scholarship

The standard internal history of the founders, and the indispensable starting point, is Alan Gauld’s The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). The fullest modern reassessment of Gurney’s place in the history of psychology is Andreas Sommer’s “Professional Heresy: Edmund Gurney (1847–88) and the Study of Hallucinations and Hypnotism” (Medical History 55, no. 3, 2011, pp. 383–388), which argues that his hallucination survey and his hypnotic-dissociation experiments were absorbed by mainstream psychology before being written out of its lineage. The society’s own biographical account is the “Edmund Gurney” article in the SPR’s Psi Encyclopedia, which sets him in the founding circle and catalogs his publications. For the wider cultural argument that telepathy itself was a datable Victorian invention rather than a perennial category, see Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); for the social and intellectual setting, Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The suicide thesis is argued in Trevor H. Hall, The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney (London: Duckworth, 1964). Gurney’s own principal works survive in full: The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880); Tertium Quid (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887); and Phantasms of the Living, with Myers and Podmore (London: Trübner, 1886), now in the public domain and available in scholarly reissue from Cambridge University Press.

He left the society its method more than its conclusions: the conviction that claims of the extraordinary should be met neither with ridicule nor with assent, but with collection, doubt, and the patient weighing of cases. It is a temper poorly suited to comfort — it will not promise that the friend seen at the hour of death was really there — and Gurney, who wanted comfort as badly as anyone, practiced it without flinching to the end of a life that ended, like so many of his cases, in a room where what happened cannot now be recovered.

→ Related: William Crookes · Franz Anton Mesmer · Henry Sidgwick · Frank Podmore · F W H Myers · Telepathy · Thought Transference Thought Reading Experimentation · Victorian Psychical Research Spr · Eleanor Sidgwick · William James · Spiritualism · Mesmerism