(IN arranging the following essays and lectures for public.) I have, therefore, felt justified in appearing before the public again, for the purpose of carrying to their legitimate conclusions some of the principles laid down in " The Law of Psychic Phenomena." Since then I have continued the search, aided by many able reviews and criticisms of my work, the result being that I have been unable to find a fact or an argument that militates against the truth of the hypothesis then formulated. Not being able to find a record of such a phenomenon, but finding, on the contrary, that every psychic fact furnished a fresh illustration of the correctness of my theory, I ventured upon its publication. Before venturing to publish that work, however, I had devoted many years to a patient and thorough investigation of the subject, with the view of ascertaining whether any psychic phenomenon had ever been observed and recorded that was inexplicable under the terms of my hypothesis. NEARLY three years have now elapsed since the publication of my first work, " The Law of Psychic Phenomena," in which I formulated, tentatively, a working hypothesis for the systematic study and correlation of all psychic phenomena. (NEARLY three years have now elapsed since the publication.) Scientific Demonstration of the Future Life Hudson, published a volume of his papers under the title, The Evolution of the Soul and Other Essays. In 1903 he published The Law of Mental Medicine and in 1904 his son, Charles B. These evolutionary speculations, however, failed to attract much popular attention, and Hudson confined his later activities largely to the Medico-Legal Society, of which he was a member, and to its Journal. Theism is simply the assertion that the evolutionary instinct is the "divine pedigree" in man, or that man is made in the image of God. Darwin's principle of "natural selection" thus becomes merely a particular instance of the conflict between these two fundamental instincts. He explained the evolutionary, racial, reproductive, or altruistic, instinct as the work of the subjective mind the instinct of conservatism or self-preservation, on the other hand, as largely the work of the human brain which is the chief organ of the objective mind. In the last-named volume he attempted to expand his ideas into a doctrine of evolution. In 1895 he published A Scientific Demonstration of the Future Life and in 1899, The Divine Pedigree of Man. But the popular religious uses to which Hudson put the ideas of the "subjective mind" incurred the enmity of the scientists and robbed the term of its experimental value.Įncouraged by his popular success, Hudson developed his ideas in a theological direction. This theory was intended to supplant the doctrines of animal magnetism, Christian Science, and other more primitive explanations of hypnotism, faith-healing, and other phenomena and it served to recommend "auto-suggestion" as on the whole not a dangerous, but a therapeutic agency, whereby man exposes himself to his "higher and heavenly" faculties. His "hypothesis" was that all mental and psychic phenomena could be explained as the effects of the objective mind (the ordinary mortal mind) operating by the power of suggestion upon the subjective mind, which is incapable of inductive reasoning, but which is immortal and which immediately controls the non-cerebral organs of the body. He is largely responsible for making the terms "subjective mind" and "suggestion" household words in America. Over a hundred thousand copies of this volume were sold and it served to popularize both him and his subject to such a degree that he resigned from the Patent Office and devoted himself entirely to lecturing and writing. In the meantime he had become increasingly interested in psychology and psychical phenomena, and in 1893 he published his best-known work, The Law of Psychic Phenomena. Three years later his career took another decided turn when he entered the United States Patent Office and from 1886 until 1893 he held the post of chief examiner. , correspondent for the Scripps syndicate. In 1866 he was a candidate for the United States Senate but was defeated. He was in turn an editor of the Port Huron Commercial Daily, of the Detroit Daily Union, and of the Detroit Evening News. , where he began to practise law, but soon turned to journalism. He was admitted to the Cleveland bar in 1857 and for the following three years practised law at Mansfield, Ohio.
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