Hudson, Thomson Jay (1834-1903)

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Hudson, Thomson Jay (1834-1903)

American author and lecturer who attained prominence by an ingenious anti-Spiritualist theory expounded in his books. He was born on February 22, 1834, in Windham, Ohio. He attended public schools in Windham and later studied law. He was admitted to the bar at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1857 and practiced for a time in Michigan before entering a journalistic career, culminating in the editorship of the Detroit Evening News. In 1880 he left journalism to enter the U.S. Patent Office, becoming principal examiner. In 1893 he resigned and devoted his time to the study of experimental psychology. Hudson was awarded an honorary LL.D. by St. John's College, Annapolis, in 1896.

The essence of his special theory of psychic phenomena, developed from studies in hypnotism, was that man has within him two distinct minds: the objective, with which he carries on his practical daily life; and the subjective, which is dormant but is infallible as a record, registering every single impression of life. The objective mind is capable of both inductive and deductive reasoning, the subjective mind of deductive only, according to Hudson's theory.

The change of death is survival in another state of consciousness, with which, however, communication is impossible. Any attempt is simply playing the fool with the subjective mind, which presents reflections of the experimenter's complete life record and lures him on to believe that he is communicating with his departed friends, Hudson said.

The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893), in which this theory is expounded, became very popular and made a deep impression. It was followed by Scientific Demonstration of the Future Life (1896), Divine Pedigree of Man (1900), Law of Mental Medicine (1903), and Evolution of the Soul and Other Essays (1904).

Hudson's theories attained an even greater popularity after they were picked up by Thomas Troward and became the basis of his famous Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1909). Troward fed the notion of two minds into New Thought, where it was eventually picked up by Ernest Holmes and became the basic insight upon which Religious Science was based.

Hudson died in Detroit on May 26, 1903. Admiral Usborne Moore writes in Glimpses of the Next State (1911) that through Mrs. Georgie, a young dramatist of Rochester who wrote automatically in mirror writing, he received manifestations of Hudson's spirit. Details of his life, unknown to both of them, were given, and he communicated through different mediums in Detroit and Chicago, carrying as a test messages of the admiral from one medium to another and describing his activities to them.