ABSTRACT

Secretaries, Edmund Gurney and Frederic Myers, and especially by Gurney, who shortly became the Society’s first Hon. Secretary and the editor of its Proceedings. In 1872 Gurney was elected to a Trinity Fellowship; he devoted himself chiefly to music, studying at Harrow under the famous teacher, John Farmer. Gurney’s unconventional thinking and his dialectic skill made him prominent amongst the younger and abler Trinity men; and his gaiety, his wit, and the profound sympathy with which his sensitive nature would respond to the troubles and afflictions of others, greatly endeared him to them as a human being. The amount of work which Myers and F. Podmore put in on Phantasms of the Living was not small; but Gurney’s efforts were prodigious. The central thesis of Phantasms of the Living is this: crisis apparitions of the kind described earlier are best interpreted as hallucinations generated in the percipient by the receipt of a telepathic ‘message’ from the dying agent.