The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

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.

For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

The second principle of magic: 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.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.