Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Lamb

Lamb crystallizes a paradox about belief. What looks like the same habit of mind has opposite value depending on who exercises it. For a grown man, untested belief is a liability: it suspends judgment, invites manipulation, and blurs the line between experience and wish. Society expects the adult to weigh evidence, to distinguish rumor from fact, to resist the charms of salesmen, demagogues, and miracle cures. Credulity here is not generosity but neglect of responsibility, a refusal to do the labor of thinking.

A child inhabits a different economy of knowledge. Trust is the medium in which learning happens. Speech, custom, the names of things, even the shape of the world arrive as testimony long before proof is possible. Fairy tales and fables, which an adult might dismiss as false, train moral feeling and imagination. To believe readily is to explore boldly, to enter stories, to try and fail and try again under the assumption that the world is intelligible and others are benevolent. That readiness is a strength because it accelerates growth; it is an engine for curiosity rather than a trap for credulity-mongers.

Lamb, the London essayist of the Romantic generation, often defends the preserving power of fancy and childhood. His airy, conversational prose cherishes the stage illusion, the old ballad, the ghost story that thrilled him young. Yet he also knows the cost when childish habits outlive their proper season. The line draws a boundary without scorning either side: reason should govern adult assent, while wonder should be protected in the young. It is less a sneer at gullibility than a plea for proportion. Keep the childs openness so the world does not grow stale; shed the adults laziness so the mind does not grow soft. The strength of maturity lies not in disbelief for its own sake, but in knowing when to believe and why.