Life & Wisdom Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is drawing a bright, almost prosecutorial line between two habits modern minds love to confuse: understanding why something happens and deciding it ought to happen. The sentence has the clipped firmness of someone who has watched clever explanations turn into moral alibis. You can practically hear the target: a culture increasingly fluent in psychology, sociology, and biology, eager to translate choice into mechanism and guilt into diagnosis.

The wording matters. "Explanation of cause" flatters the intellect; it promises mastery, the satisfying click of a system that accounts for behavior. "Justification by reason" is a different project entirely: it belongs to ethics, not analysis. Lewis is warning that once you let causal stories do moral work, you smuggle in a quiet fatalism: if a man stole because of poverty, resentment, trauma, brain chemistry, then the theft becomes less a wrong to judge than an inevitability to file. Compassion enters, but accountability leaks out.

The subtext is not anti-science; it's anti-category error. Lewis, writing in an era shaped by Freudian explanations and Marxian accounts of history, knew how quickly "because" can become "therefore excusable". His Christian moral imagination insists that causes can mitigate without absolving, illuminate without exonerating. The line is also a defense of moral language itself: if every value claim dissolves into causal description, "reason" stops being a court and becomes a lab report.

It's a short sentence that polices the border between empathy and endorsement, and it does so with the economy of someone who knows that the most dangerous arguments are the ones that feel like enlightenment.