James george frazer6/16/2023 ![]() The thoughts of the earliest human beings contained the content from which more complex ideas evolved and developed.įrazer was fascinated with the topic of magic and the historical relations of magic and religion, and wished to learn how it came into being and what its fundamental differences to religion were. He attempted to show that human intelligence formed progressively, and he thought that cognitive development, stemming from the beginning of time to the present (which Frazer refers to as a “chain”), could be measured. He proposed an evolutionist view of religious thought and consciousness arguing that magic, religion, and science belonged to an evolutionary sequence. It was a reconstruction of the sequential history of the modes of human thought (of which he gave three: magic, religion, science), was an attempt to provide a description of the “chemistry of the mind” that would propel forward the journey of human progress, and also an examination of religious phenomenon as he saw it practiced in the historical record as well as within his own time of writing. James Frazer (1854-1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist who authored the well-known work The Golden Bough (1890), a twelve-volume collection of materials on the so-called “savage mind.”įrazer’s book had several purposes.
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