Life & Wisdom Quote by Elbert Hubbard

Hubbard’s line flatters the reader into a particular kind of modern confidence: the world isn’t haunted, it’s merely untranslated. “The supernatural is the natural not yet understood” is less a metaphysical claim than a cultural posture, one that takes mystery and recasts it as a temporary administrative problem. The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Not yet” smuggles in inevitability, implying that knowledge is always advancing and that today’s awe is tomorrow’s explanation. It turns wonder into a promissory note.

The subtext is a rebuke of credulity without the messiness of calling anyone foolish. Instead of sneering at religion or superstition, Hubbard offers a dignified off-ramp: you can keep your sense of enchantment, just file it under “pending.” That rhetorical move is part of why the quote has endured; it comforts skeptics and romantics at the same time, letting both camps feel sophisticated.

Context matters. Hubbard wrote in an America intoxicated by progress - electricity, industrial scale, mass communication - and also fascinated by Spiritualism, seances, and the stagecraft of the occult. His sentence lands as a Progressive Era slogan: science as the solvent of myth, rationality as moral improvement. It also sells a certain entrepreneurial optimism (very Hubbard): the unknown isn’t a boundary, it’s a market for understanding. The risk, of course, is arrogance. Some mysteries don’t resolve on schedule, and some “supernatural” stories persist not because they’re stupid, but because they’re useful - emotionally, socially, politically. Hubbard’s genius is compressing that whole debate into a line that feels like common sense.