Edmund Gurney - Experimental Work

Experimental Work

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.

Gurney's hypnotic experiments were undertaken in the years 1885 to 1888. Their tendency was, in Myers's view, to prove that there is sometimes, in the induction of hypnotic phenomena, some agency at work which is neither ordinary nervous stimulation nor suggestion conveyed by any ordinary channel to the subject's mind. These results, if accepted, would corroborate the idea of telepathy. Experiments by Joseph Gibert, Paul Janet, Charles Richet, Méricourt and others were cited as tending in the same direction.

Other experiments dealt with the relation of the memory in the hypnotic state to the memory in another hypnotic state, and of both to the normal memory. Gurney's research into psychic matters was respected by contemporaries. However, it has since then been argued to be deeply flawed: Gurney trusted in the assistance of one George Albert Smith, a theatrical performer and producer. Smith was the one handling the actual experiments into telepathy, hypnotism, and the rest, and Gurney fully accepted his results. According to Hall, in the spring of 1888 Gurney discovered that Smith had used his knowledge of theatrical trickery and stage illusion to fake tests and results; so that the value of the tests (with which Gurney was building up his reputation) were worthless. Douglas Blackburn, Smith's principal partner in the mentalist performances and experiments, publicly admitted fraud in 1908 and again in 1911, although Smith denied it.