Education Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

Modernity loves the story where reason triumphs and the old world slinks off in embarrassment. Hearn punctures that self-congratulating plotline. He’s not defending superstition as truth; he’s diagnosing how “lesser knowledge” can make us arrogant in two directions at once: credulous about our own era, contemptuous about everyone else’s. The sly move is in his verb choice: things we “imagined” to be useless “prove” valuable. Imagination belongs to the present as much as the past, and proof arrives late, after the damage of dismissal has already been done.

The intent reads as a warning to a fin-de-siecle audience drunk on progress. Hearn wrote when anthropology, comparative religion, and the early social sciences were prying open cultural practices Europeans had written off as primitive. He’d lived in Japan and became unusually sensitive to what gets lost when modernization treats tradition as clutter. Underneath the polite phrasing is a sharper claim: utility isn’t always legible to the people doing the judging. Rituals can encode social cohesion; taboos can be crude public health; “useless” stories can be psychological technology, teaching people how to endure.

The subtext also catches a contemporary nerve. We still run the same algorithm: declare an old practice irrational, then rediscover its function dressed up as “wellness,” “community,” or “behavioral science.” Hearn’s line isn’t nostalgia. It’s intellectual humility with teeth, insisting that the past deserves investigation, not sneers, because civilization’s junk drawer keeps turning out to be a toolbox.