Ebook: The heyday of spiritualism

William Slater Brown (1896-1997) was an American novelist, biographer, and translator of French literature.

He notes that "The resurgence of popular belief in a spiritual world that is eternal, infinite, primary, and the ultimate home of all mortals was mainly due to Emanuel Swedenborg... In the 1830s and 1840s no American author of any account considered himself an informed man of letters unless he could discuss Heaven and Hell or other works of Swedenborg with some degree of intelligent understanding."

About the Fox Sisters, he notes, "Fraud as an explanation has the virtue of simplicity, but it leaves a number of problems unsolved. If the two girls produced the sounds fraudulently, it is difficult to understand how they succeeded in doing so without detection... the rappings sometimes continued steadily for four or more hours... during which time they responded to a barrage of questions... But what is even more difficult to explain than the rappings is the extraordinary manner in which they gave accurate answers to the questions."