Early Life
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.
Read more about this topic: Edmund Gurney
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)