James George Frazer

Quotes

1. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

2. 

   The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.

3. 

   In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

4. 

   It may be suspected that the custom of employing a divine man or animal as a public scapegoat is much more widely diffused than appears from the examples cited.

5. 

   It is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress--moral and intellectual as well as material--in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity.

6. 

   The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

7. 

   Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

8. 

   For myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have been long forgotten.The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.

9. 

   The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

10. 

    Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a grand hunting out and expulsion of devils and ghosts. They think that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors, they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.

11. 

    In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alterations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature.

12. 

    If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will.