MR. EDMUND GURNEY'S PSYCHICAL STUDIES.* Txtz premature death of Mr.

Edmund Gurney, at an age when he was but beginning to do the work for which he was so admirably fitted, is a very great misfortune not only to the "Society for Psychical Research," of which he and Mr. F. W. H. Myers were the chief props, but to the psychology of England. Mr. Gurney was no credulous dreamer who swallowed all the marvellous stories of which he could get a shred of evidence. We undertake to say that there has not often been a more • Proceoiings of the Society for Peychical Research, Jo/Re, 1888. London : TrObner and 0o.

careful sifter of the evidence of unusual phenomena than Mr. Gurney, and that far from leaning towards the credulous view of the class of phenomena with which mostly he busied himself, he was the most naturalistic of theorists, and was disposed to prefer explanations which we should often regard as hardly explanations at all,—so little more were they than lucid résumés of the facts of which they professed to be rationales,—rather than admit hypotheses which assumed that of which there was no direct proof. In the present number of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, there are two papers by Mr. Edmund Gurney, both of them careful, both of them interesting, both of them leaning to the most parsimonious of theories,—if theory it

could be called,—and both of them showing the utmost anxiety to state fully all those facts which bore unfavourably on the reality of the phenomena which he was investigating, and to attenuate instead of enhancing the marvel of the elements involved. Let those who make light of the Pro-

ceedings of the Society for Psychical Research honestly study the late Mr. Edmund Gurney's papers ; and though they may disagree with him in some of his conclusions, we venture to affirm that they will never again say that he was a gullible or credulous investigator, and not disposed to apply every check which an acute intelligence could suggest to the many curious investigations which he conducted.

Take, for instance, the first paper in this number of the Pro- .ceedings, which is due to Mr. Edmund Gurney's own pen. He

is describing a series of experiments on what he calls "intelli- gent automatism," which he made in conjunction with Mr. G.

A. Smith, who was the mesmerist, or " hypnotiser," as Mr. Gurney preferred to call it, by whom the preliminary ry mesmeric trance essential to the experiments was always induced. The procedure was as follows. Mr. G. A. Smith sent off one of the patients into a mesmeric sleep, and in this sleep the patient was told that he was to write some particular word, or to count the number of " e's " in a particular verse, or to do a particular multiplication sum when he awoke. Then his mind, still in the trance, was usually occupied with something of an in- teresting nature, such as a story, previous to waking him, in -order that if (as it sometimes, though rarely, happened) he remembered in his waking state anything of the experience of his trance, it might be the story, and not the task given him to do ; and then he was wakened and at once engaged in reading aloud, or counting backwards, or doing something that engrossed his full attention ; but his right hand was placed on the planchette (an instrument on wheels containing a pencil), the paper and planchette being always concealed from the subject's eyes, so that he could not know, unless he were able to guess from the blind movements of the instrument under his hand (which guessing was made very difficult by the occupation found for him), what letters or figures (if any) the instrument was tracing. "As a rule, he was always offered a _sovereign to say what the writing was, but the reward was never gained." On being sent back into the mesmeric sleep, he recalled the whole process, though in the waking state he could never tell what the movements of the planchette under his hand were engaged in producing. Here is Mr. Gurney's account of the results as regards the arithmetical sums worked by what he calls the "secondary intelligence" of the sleeper, after the sleep was over, but worked without the com- plicity of the primary intelligence (i.e., the man himself, as we should say) :—

" The sums given were simple, as most of the 'subjects ' were inexpert at mental arithmetic. There were 131 sums in which three figures had to be multiplied by a single one ; of these 52 were quite right, 28 had three figures in the answer right, 18 had two figures right, and 14 had one figure right only, whilst 12 were quite wrong, and 7 were either so illegible and muddled as to be undecipherable, or only a small stroke or curve was made at all. There were 75 sums in which two figures had to be multiplied by one (the multiplier never exceeding 12), and of these 41 were worked quite correctly, 2 had three figures in the answer right, 9 had two figures right, 4 had only one figure right, and in 19 instances the pencillings were illegible. In some cases of this class the sum itself was correctly written, but no attempt was made to put the answer. There were 2 sums in which four figures had to be multiplied by one ; both were correctly done. A few sums of other kinds were also given : of 14 simple addition (of about the following difficulty : 4 + 7 + 9 + 11 + 13) 6 were done correctly, 2 were quite wrong, and the remaining 6 were either not done at all, or the answers were illegible scribbles. Of 5 multiplication money sums (4 s. d. and farthings x by a single figure) 3 were worked correctly,—thus Wells correctly multiplied 12s. 31d. by 8, repeating God Save the Queen' meanwhile, with every other word left out—and the other was indecipherable; and one money subtraction sum (shillings, pence, and farthings) was correctly done. Another case illustrates the very distinct memory, on re-hypnotisation, of what had been written. Wells was told to work out the sum, '13 loaves at 5d. each,' and instantly woke as usual. He wrote, 13 loaf at 5d. is 5s. 5d.' When hypnotised again, and asked to say what he had written, he replied, '13 loaf —oh, I've put loaf instead of loaves—at 5d. is 5s. 5d. I've written the 13 twice—see--but I crossed it out.' He then proceeded, by a long roundabout process, to work the problem out, arriving at the correct answer again."

And here, again, is another form of the same experiment :—

" Another form of experiment was to tell the 'subject' to count the number of times a certain letter occurred in a given verse. Thus, Wells was told to write down the number of times the letter E occurred in the verse- ' Mary had a little lamb,

Its fleece was white as snow, Everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go '—

and then, after saying the verso once quickly through to show that he knew it, he was instantly awakened and given Tit-Bits to read. Whilst thus engaged he wrote, The letter E comes 11 times —which is right. The same experiment was tried with Parsons, who also was kept occupied by being set to read immediately upon waking ; but he was not so accurate, and wrote down '12.' He was completely successful, however, when told to write the

number of E's in

God save our gracious Queen, Long live our noble Queen, God save the Queen,'

and wrote 11, having read excellently the whole time."

Mr. Gurney gives us a considerable list of these experiments made on different individuals, almost always,—even when the result was in some sense a failure,—with some more or less remarkable consequence. His inference is that these trances induced by mesmerism, or whatever we like to call the peculiar influence which special persons seem to possess of rendering others unconscious,—separates the mind of the patient into two separate planes of consciousness, each of which is capable of accomplishing such simple intellectual tasks as the sub- ject's education has fitted him to perform, but nevertheless without the privity of the other, so that the man is apparently subdivided into two men, one of whom is reading aloud, and. the other working a sum or counting the number of " e's " in a stanza, though the man who is doing the sum has little or no knowledge of what his alter ego is reading aloud; while the man who is reading aloud has no knowledge at all of the operations of the alter ego who is doing the sum.

Whether this be or be not the true explanation of this curious class of experiments, of which Mr. Edmund Gurney had accumulated a very large number of authentic cases before his lamented death, we are not going to be so rash as to pass an opinion. But we cannot deny Mr. Gurney the credit of having taken an immense deal of pains both with the subject which the Society for Psychical Research has called telepathy, and with this subject of what might be called doubly refracted intelligence, nor that he had added very largely to the care- fully classified and observed data for gauging the resources of the human mind in its more or less abnormal conditions. We believe that in Mr. Edmund Gurney, a Society of very useful and shrewd investigators has lost one of the ablest of its members, and we heartily deplore the premature death of so thoughtful, so careful, so candid, and so keen an observer.