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.
The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.
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.
The world cannot live at the level of its great men.
For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion .
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.
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 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.
I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.
In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.
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.
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.