James Frazer: Thought

James Frazer was Scottish social anthropologist. Explore interesting quotes on thought.
James Frazer: 100 quotes1 like

“When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 9, The Worship of Trees.

“It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magicians practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science from the bastard art.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 3, Sympathetic Magic.

“The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 64, The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires.

“For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 3, Sympathetic Magic.

“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.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 29, The Myth of Adonis.

“In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi