Time & Perspective Quote by Catherine Crowe

Crowe’s sentence reads like a Victorian séance conducted in the grammar of moral reform: calm, reasonable, and quietly radical. The key move is the phrase “cannot but think” - a softening hedge that signals she’s entering disputed territory without picking a brawl. In a century where respectable society was negotiating between church doctrine, scientific prestige, and a booming market for spiritualism, that restraint is strategic. She’s not proclaiming revelation; she’s offering a “great step” in mindset, the language of progress applied to metaphysics.

The intent is less to prove ghosts than to reframe the human self. “Familiarise themselves” treats the soul as an idea that can be domesticated, made ordinary through repetition. That’s a subtle cultural program: if people can be trained to think of themselves as “spirits incorporated,” then the body becomes a temporary costume, not the total definition of personhood. It’s consolation, but also discipline. A society that takes this seriously is nudged toward different priorities - less fixation on status and fleshly appetites, more emphasis on character, continuity, accountability.

Crowe’s subtext is polemical without sounding polemical. The formulation gently undermines hard materialism while avoiding overt sectarian preaching. Even the bureaucratic word “incorporated” matters: it suggests embodiment as an administrative arrangement, a contract with an end date. The line’s slightly mangled repetition (“re spirits...”) ironically mirrors the very project she’s advocating: repeating the thought until it sticks, until the strange becomes familiar.