This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages.

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative..

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 h….

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

The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough..

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament..

Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life..

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 abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in ….

The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux..

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 ou….

The world cannot live at the level of its great men..

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 i….

If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, ….

The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or ….

If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime..

I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic..

For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion..

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the p….