Psychology and Folk-loreMethuen & Company, Limited, 1920 - 275 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
Acheulean Andrew Lang anthro Archæology Australia belief Central Australia civilized common sense concerned connexion course culture culture-contact custom divine Dr Rivers E. B. Tylor Edward Tylor esotericism ethics ethnological evolution evolutionary experience fact folk-lore folk-lorist Golden Bough Gomme hand Hence human hylomorphic instance institutions interest kind Laurence Gomme less likewise logical magic magic and religion mankind matter means medicine-man mental merely method mind moral Mousterian namely nature Neolithic notion organization origins peasant perhaps philosophy Piltdown pology practical prehistoric present primitive principle progress psychological purposes question regard religion religious rites sacred savage savagery scientific side simply Sir James Frazer social social anthropology Society sociological sort soul spirit stands student supernatural survivals tendency term theology theory things thought tion totemic tradition tribes truth Tylor University whereas whereby whole word
Popular passages
Page 34 - I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill ; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Page 182 - 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.
Page 75 - Sometimes old thoughts and practices will burst out afresh, to the amazement of a world that thought them long since dead or dying; here survival passes into revival, as has lately happened in so remarkable a way in the history of modern spiritualism, a subject full of instruction from the ethnographer's point of view.
Page 185 - But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes ? It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume that the honour of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human reason.
Page 178 - Nemi himself, the nominal hero of the long tragedy of human folly and suffering which has unrolled itself before the readers of these volumes, and on which the curtain is now about to fall. He, too, for all the quaint garb he wears and the gravity with which he stalks across the stage, is merely a puppet, and it is time to unmask him before laying him up in the box.
Page 166 - It is the common experience of man that he can draw on a power that makes for, and in its most typical form wills, righteousness, the sole condition being that a certain fear, a certain shyness and humility, accompany the effort so to do.
Page 185 - Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are magicians, but not one is a priest ; everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.
Page 183 - If my analysis of the magician's logic is correct, its two great principles turn out to be merely two different misapplications of the association of ideas. Homoeopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity: contagious magic is founded on the association of ideas by contiguity.
Page 178 - In this as in other branches of study it is the fate of theories to be washed away like children's castles of sand by the rising tide of knowledge, and I am not so presumptuous as to expect or desire for mine an exemption from the common lot. I hold them all very lightly and have used them chiefly as convenient pegs on which to hang my collections of facts. For I believe that, while theories are transitory, a record of facts has a permanent value...
Page 178 - ... more than a stalking-horse to carry two heavy pack-loads of facts. And what is true of Balder applies equally to the priest of Nemi himself, the nominal hero of the long tragedy of human folly and suffering which has unrolled itself before the readers of these volumes, and on which the curtain is now about to fall.