Life & Wisdom Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn links ethics to history and contact. The world he knew at the turn of the twentieth century was one of rapid travel, expanding empires, comparative religion, and the unsettling authority of science. Old certainties lost their monopoly, and peoples who had long lived apart were reading, trading, and arguing with one another. Against this background, he argues that an ethical system adequate to modern life must make room for broad tolerance of beliefs. Without that tolerance, encounters become occasions for contempt and coercion; with it, they become grounds for curiosity, sympathy, and reform without violence.

Hearn had lived the problem in his own life. Born in Greece to an Irish father and Greek mother, then raised in Europe, then working as a journalist in the United States and the Caribbean, and finally settling in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo, he was a bridge between worlds. He urged Western readers to approach Shinto, Buddhism, and Japanese social customs not as errors to be corrected but as coherent responses to different histories and needs. Tolerance here is not indifference. It is the discipline of withholding quick judgment, learning causes and functions, and separating harmful acts from mere difference in creed.

The new ethics he envisions is secular in method and humane in spirit. It recognizes that belief is often inherited, that evidence is partial, and that sincere people can reason within divergent traditions. It accepts that moral insight can be found outside the institutions one happens to know. And it treats persuasion, education, and example as better tools than force. Such tolerance does not excuse cruelty or injustice; rather, it provides the only stable basis for challenging them in a plural world. By expanding sympathy and shrinking arrogance, it lets communities negotiate shared rules while honoring the convictions that give life meaning to their members.