“If you don’t believe in something you’ll fall for anything.”
I am always struck by the rationality of people whose work I read from a hundred years ago. They never fell for voodoo.
Nowadays, people make fun of traditionalists, calling them “regressive”. Yet moderns seem more liketly to believe and fall for the strangest things.
That may be a consequence of the authors you're selecting. There was a big spiritualism movement in the the late 19th to early 20th century.