For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be p….

The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation..

Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Chris….

In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of m….

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes..

The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man..

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..

For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, ….

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly be….

The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being..

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of natur….

The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indi….

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, ….

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 calami….

Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study..

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves..

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 ….

Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of….

With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them a….

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