116 quotes found
"If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its importance in the history of religion, still less because I would deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the significance of a priest who bore the title of King Of the Wood, and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough — the Golden Bough — from a tree in the sacred grove."
"A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier."
"If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not."
"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."
"The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once."
"For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion."
"Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance...to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man...The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent."
"But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard."
"The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron."
"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."
"By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life."
"Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion."
"We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below."
"If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility."
"Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all."
"I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic."
"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."
"The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others."
"In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings."
"With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art."
"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."
"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."
"It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very gradually, to allow the soul time to return."
"The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology."
"In primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."
"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."
"Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life."
"If any of my readers set out with the notion that that all races of men think and act much in the same way as educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so erroneous a prepossession."
"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."
"If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime."
"Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study."
"The world cannot live at the level of its great men."
"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."
"The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial."
"For ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and lonely mere, from the riven murky cloud that belches forth lightning, and from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon or fret with flakes of burning red the golden eve."
"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."
"The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being."
"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."
"For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal."
"The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats."
"The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation."
"The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man."
"To a modern reader the connexion at first sight may not be obvious between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of the earth."
"From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of superstitious veneration in Europe."
"It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe. True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with the mistletoe. But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over the humble plant."
"For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part."
"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."
"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."
"The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes."
"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."
"The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough."
"If you can imagine some strange hybrid of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carlos Castaneda and Edward Gibbon, you may get some idea of the importance of J.G. Frazer to his contemporaries; he was one of the great systematic thinkers of the 19th century, to rank alongside Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer; and yet he is now an almost forgotten figure. As an anthropologist and historian of religion he helped to create what his biographer calls "the modern spirit" – even though to many people this will mean no more than the fact that his great work, The Golden Bough, was deployed by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land."
"The idea for it [The Love That Whirls] came from Fraser's The Golden Bough. The film was to present a ritual of sacrifice."
"Studies of culture like The Golden Bough and the usual comparative ethnological volumes are analytical discussions of traits and ignore all the aspects of cultural integration."
"When posterity comes to estimate the work of our age, the record of Sir James Frazer would suffice, almost of itself, to redeem it of a charge of sterility. It is a work, to be sure, which sums up and organizes the past, marshals it, so to say, with the sweep of an encyclopædic construction of theory; the sort of work, as Spengler tells us, which civilization performs after its creative ardour is spent. That is to undervalue it grossly: science, when she brings to bear upon the meaningless disorder of fact such inventive insight as Frazer's, creates as truly and as boldly as art."
"Scholars before him may have equalled this monument of toil, but Frazer has the kind of genius which, in spite of Carlyle, goes so rarely with this "infinite capacity for taking pains." He conjectures with a boldness which ranks him among the great pioneers; he has in his speculation a vision so far-reaching that one marvels at the power of this eye to adjust itself to the microscopic focus which much of his work demands. With it all, this exact yet daring scientist is also a great writer. It is much that he is always lucid and never writes a less than perfect sentence, but these are the least of the merits of an artist who can pass with ease from humorous irony to the high colours of a bravura passage."
"To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough."
"In any case Tylor's (and Frazer’s) general outlook was one that later on became adopted and developed by the psychoanalysts, in whose hands the general similarities between the different aspects of "primitive mind"—whether in the child, the dreamer, the neurotic or the savage—have recently undergone an elaboration which seems likely to establish a successful and progressive "comparative psychology" upon a very wide basis."
"Tylor paved the way for Sir James Frazer, who, in a series of great treatises, Totemism and Exogamy, The Golden Bough, The Folklore of the Old Testament, The Belief in Immortality, etc., each of them in several volumes (no less than twelve in the last edition of The Golden Bough), gave to the world a vast wealth of material presented in a most attractive form. Frazer had the patience and enthusiasm of the collector, combined with an astonishing power of marshalling his facts and a rare literary charm. His weakness lay, perhaps, in a lack of theoretical insight wherewith to interpret his results, and a want of critical discrimination with regard to the relative value of the innumerable sources from which his data were collected."
"Frazer laid matters out in such a way as to support my instinctive belief that divinity was bunk. He was a scholar, he had studied tribal societies. It was a moment of great excitement. Now everything became clear to me. The earliest people had seen their gods in natural phenomena they didn't understand. They didn't understand thunder so they made a god of thunder. They didn't understand why there were good seasons and bad seasons so they made a god of fertility. And then the Earth Mother appeared all over the world, the universal god controlling the mysterious process of conception in humans, animals and plants."
"In its boundless erudition, its constructive imagination, and its wealth of suggestion, the Golden Bough stands forth as perhaps the most notable contribution of the age to our knowledge of the evolution of the human race."
"Among my own contemporaries was J. G. Frazer, who was soon to light the dark wood of savage superstition with a gleam from The Golden Bough. The happy title of that book—Sir James Frazer has a veritable genius for titles—made it arrest the attention of scholars. They saw in comparative anthropology a serious subject actually capable of elucidating a Greek or Latin text. Tylor had written and spoken; Robertson Smith, exiled for heresy, had seen the Star in the East; in vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes; but at the mere sound of the magical words "Golden Bough" the scales fell—we heard and understood."
"The author of The Golden Bough holds a unique position in our present world. There are few men of letters writing to-day of whom it can be said with greater certainty that their works will be collected. For Sir James is both a man of letters and also an historian; and, as Bury said when he edited The Decline and Fall and noted how Gibbon had endured, this is a combination which makes a man immortal. Indeed Sir James's position may, when men look back, appear even more commanding than Gibbon's. For Gibbon only made ordered and more amusing for the polished world what was known to every contemporary scholar about the ancient world. But Frazer revealed a completely strange world, and strove to interpret, not to mock, its strangeness."
"The Golden Bough, compared by Virgil to the mistletoe but now revealing some affinity to the banyan, has not only waxed a great tree but has spread to a spacious and hospitable forest, whose king receives homage in many tongues from a multitude resorting thither for its fruit or timber or refreshing shade. There they find learning mated with literature, labour disguised in ease, and a museum of dark and uncouth superstitions invested with the charm of a truly sympathetic magic. There you have gathered together, for the admonition of a proud and oblivious race, the scattered and fading relics of its foolish childhood, whether withdrawn from our view among savage folk and in different countries, or lying unnoticed at our doors. The forgotten milestones of the road which man has travelled, the mazes and blind alleys of his appointed progress through time, are illuminated by your art and genius, and the strangest of remote and ancient things are brought near to the minds and hearts of your contemporaries."
"If we define, then an anthropologist as one who passionately loves the continuity of tradition and works for its preservation and development, who also brings to this task a profound knowledge of our own mythology as well as of the superstitions of other savages—Sir James Frazer is the greatest anthropologist of our age."
"In this work of revealing to us the full human meaning of Greek and Latin culture, Frazer started with his classical interests. The six volumes of his Pausanias give us a vision of ancient Greece as it was in the times of Imperial Rome. In his Golden Bough, starting from one of the most inexplicable and barbarous customs recorded from Latium, Frazer gives us the theory of primitive culture and of the rational savagery of human faith, a theory which will for ever remain a master piece of comparative anthropology."
"The case for Frazer—who like Spencer is rather under a cloud to-day—is too complex and technical to be argued briefly here. His use of the comparative method on an enormous scale can be faulted, though the fascinating detail it reveals and the charm of his Augustan style ensure that he is still read. His industry was truly Darwinian, and I believe that his success in subsuming vast masses of data under a few leading ideas was considerable. Unfortunately the anti-evolutionary reaction, largely led by Malinowski, has resulted in neglect of Frazer's achievement. Such a reaction was not surprising, for hypothetical yet untestable evolutionary theories had multiplied endlessly in the early years of the present century. In rejecting these a new freedom was gained, but, alas, much that was solid in the work of a Frazer or a Westermack was forgotten."
"But just occasionally an epic reference book is so beautifully written that it actually inspires artistic creativity. Think of how T. S. Eliot acknowledged his huge debt to J. G. Frazer's anthropological masterpiece, The Golden Bough, in the preface to The Waste Land. And rightly so: I am currently reading a new paperback edition of Frazer's monumental study of ritual slayings (invaluable background for anybody working in a newspaper office), and it has lost none of its stupendous evocative power in the 80 years since it was finished."
"I remember the shock, the combined shock of interest and almost of horror, with which The Golden Bough burst upon classical scholars like me when it first appeared in 1890. Of course it was not quite our first introduction to anthropology. We knew something of Tylor and Andrew Lang and perhaps Mannhardt, perhaps even of Robertson Smith's sacred camel which had to be eaten alive before sunrise. But Frazer, for one thing, overpowered us with his mass of carefully ordered facts. We had heard of "the beastly devices of the heathen" but had not realised their great number and variety, had not understood the method which underlay their madness."
"The long avenues of thought that have led from Frazer's Golden Bough seem to start physically in front of the dining-room fireplace of the home where as a boy of 15 I sat hour after hour absorbing first the one-volume abridgment and then the three-volume edition. I cannot imagine how different my mental and religious life would have been if the impact of J. G. Frazer had come at another time or not at all."
"When the history of British anthropology during the last half century or something more comes to be written, it will be found that three names stand clear away from those of their contemporaries—Tylor, Haddon, and Frazer. Each of these men represents an aspect of the science of man: Tylor as the initiator of general ethnology in the modern critical sense; Haddon receiving the torch and begetting (with Rivers's help) a school of precise field anthropology; Frazer, the supreme interpreter on the literary side of man's hopes, fears, and beliefs, his relations with his gods, his fellows, and with his own soul."
"Frazer, Harrison and the others took the politeness out of myths and released them from the tameness of mere decoration. They saw them as reflecting the bare substructures of society and of its rituals; and they emphasised the irrational, dark elements of myth (in keeping with the age of Nietzsche). For them, Dionysus was not only the merry god of wine, he was the god whose possessed followers tore living creatures into bloody fragments."
"I still possess the complete edition of Frazer's The Golden Bough which Aubrey gave me at that time, and which opened my eyes to the ritualistic origins of theatre, affecting considerably the way I was later to conceive of opera."
"Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors."
"Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves."
"The Golden Bough (not to speak of the many other anthropological volumes) is one of those books which have a tremendously vitalising and fertilising effect upon a branch of human knowledge. It is not unworthy of comparison with The Origin of Species. Both books consist largely of an immense number of facts, collected and related with immense patience; in both the generalisations from this vast accumulation of facts are made with extreme caution and even reluctance, and at the same time they have a kind of cosmic range and relevance. To many people Frazer seemed to do for the mental evolution of the human race what Darwin had done for its physical evolution. Whatever be the ultimate judgment upon his method and conclusions, there can be no doubt of the profound effect that he has had upon the science of anthropology."
"It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all."
"It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm."
"The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal."
"Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation."
"All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe."
"As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity."
"If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant."
"Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all."
"If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed."
"The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness."
"There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies rather than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents."
"We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act."
"Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt."
"A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality."
"In Europe itself it is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure."
"As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep."
"If indeed there were a judgment-day, it would be for man to appear at the bar not as a criminal but as accuser."
"As the saints and prophets were often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. … To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall."
"What a state of society is this in which free-thinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?"
"A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile."
"The Supreme Power is not a Mind; not a Force; not a Being, but something higher than a Being; something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas."
"Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals."
"And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds."
"All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors or philanthropists; but all men can join in that gigantic and godlike work, the progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part."
"The one, the outstanding, dramatic, imaginative, historical picture of life, to be inspired by Victorian science."
"The first rational exposition of the relations of mankind to the mystery which shrouds the how and wherefore of man’s existence."
"One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man…It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process."
"Reade was an emancipating writer because he seemed to speak as man to man to resolve history into an intelligible pattern in which there was no need for miracles. Even if he was wrong, he was grown-up."
"It made me what I am."
"Though I think that man has from nature the capacity of living, either by prey, or upon the fruits of the earth; it appears to me, that by nature, and in his original state, he is a frugivorous animal, and that he only becomes an animal of prey by acquired habit."
"As to Duration, I still think it is absolutely impossible to conceive it without something that exists, and continues to exist, i.e. to endure. But how it should be a property of the thing existing is to me inconceivable. One thing... is absolutely certain, viz. that if eternal Duration be a property of the Supreme Being, Duration limited must be a property of inferior beings; so that we have here some common property. I find you agree with Dr Clarke, in considering Time and Duration as the same. But this is an error that Dr Clarke has fallen into, by not being learned in the Ancient Metaphysics; for there he would have learned that time is only the measure of motion. It therefore could not exist, but with the material world; so that, if we could suppose nothing existing but the Supreme Mind, which is immoveable, there would in that case be Duration, or αίών,—as the Greek Philosophers call it—but not χρόνος, or Time. And the Doctor should not have rejected the common distinction, made by all Philosophers and Divines before him, betwixt Time and Eternity, without assigning better reasons than he has done."
"In the 1795 text, the "History of man" section of Antient metaphysics, it bursts into flower. The "Shanscrit," Monboddo says, is the original language of India and all the other languages of India are dialects that are more or less corrupt; it is "the most perfect language that is, or, I believe, ever was, on this earth; for it is more perfect than the Greek" (Burnett 1779-99, 4:322)"
"There is a language, still existing and preserved among the Brahmins of India, which is a richer and in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer. All the other languages of India have great resem- blance to this language, which is called the Shanscrit. . . . I shall be able to clearly prove that the Greek is derived from the Shanscrit, which was the ancient language of Egypt and was carried by the Egyptians to India with their other arts and into Greece by the colonies which they settled there."
"My lord and Dr Johnson disputed a little, whether the savage or the London shopkeeper had the best existence; his lordship, as usual, preferring the savage."
"It may be safely asserted, and yet without implying any direct participation in the Monboddo doctrine touching the probability of the human race having once been monkeys, that men do play very strange and extraordinary tricks."
"The rise of every man he loved to trace, Up to the very pod O! And, in baboons, our parent race Was found by old Monboddo. Their A, B, C, he made them speak, And learn their qui, quæ, quod, O! Till Hebrew, Latin, Welsh, and Greek They knew as well's Monboddo!"
"Now we proceed to consider the oldest race of great stature that has yet been discovered, one which flourished in the south of France when the last of the cold periods was lifting from Europe. The first examples of this race were discovered in 1868, when a railway was being constructed in the valley of the Vézère, a tributary of the Dordogne. A cutting made in the débris at the foot of the limestone cliffs which flank the valley of the Vézère at Cro-Magnon, brought to light the skeletons of a man, of a woman, and part of the skull of a third individual. Hence this ancient type or race is usually named Cro-Magnon."
"In all the medical schools of London a notice is posted over the door leading to the dissecting room forbidding strangers to enter. I propose, however, to push the door open and ask the reader to accompany me within, for, if we are to understand the human body; it is essential that we should see the students at work."
"We have to face the fact that we are the descendants of apelike ancestors. The truth, at first sight, is often ugly and repulsive to our personal feelings, but when it is the truth, its ultimate effects on us are always salutary. ... ... Man's brain does not stand as a thing apart; it is the culmination of an ascending series. There is no part of it and no function manifested by it that cannot be traced to humble beginnings lower in the animal scale. And what we postulate for man's brain we must in all justice apply to that of the ape, the dog, and all other beasts."
"From what we know of living anthropoids, we may infer that the chief mental activities of the group will be three in number—namely, those concerning with mating, maternity, and social behaviour. Each group will be attached to a territory and maintain its isolation."