James G. Frazer Quotes
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.
Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Macmillan, 1922, p. 48.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Many important breakthroughs emanated from scientific curiosity of some scientist who was not thinking of any practical application at all.
He was a friend of Sir Humphery Davy and other men of science. The word “science” was in common use, but there was no word for the person who practiced science. “Science Man” had been used but the English men of science were mostly of the upper class and appending “man” to a function was much too lower class for their taste. For example: “Coachman”, “Policeman”, “Iceman”, “Trashman”. So when Coleridge came up with “Scientist”, it received rapid approval and has been in use ever since.
Although a conservative Republican, he and most other CEOs of modern companies do not denigrate and ignore science the way many other conservatives have done over the years.
Sir James George Frazer OM FRS FRSE FBA was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details the similarities among magical and religious beliefs around the world. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science.
