It is often the clever people who would be entirely rational and unprejudiced that best succeed in duping themselves at once by their reason and their folly.

A fine old crusted prejudice commonly stands for a thousand acts of judgment amassed into a convenient working result; a single act of an individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain an equal sum of wisdom.

Scientific discovery is not advanced by a multitude of curious and ingenious amateurs in learned folly.

Whether the claims of spiritualism are warrantable or fallacious, Mrs Browning, gifted as she was with rare powers of mind, was not qualified to investigate those claims; it was a waste of energy, from which she could not but suffer serious risks and certain loss.
Before she had seen anything for herself she was a believer--a believer, as she describes it, on testimony.

The fact of communication with the invisible world appeared to her more important than anything that had been communicated.