Man, God and immortality : thoughts on human progress / passages chosen from the writings of Sir James George Frazer ; revised and edited by the author.

  • James George Frazer
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man, God and immortality : thoughts on human progress / passages chosen from the writings of Sir James George Frazer ; revised and edited by the author. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE In this volume are collected some of the more general conclusions to which my studies of early society and religion led me in past years, and for the convenience of readers who lack the leisure or the taste to pursue the subject in detail they have been disengaged from the heavy masses of facts on which they are founded. There is no doubt a certain risk in thus divorcing conclusions from premises, in pre¬ senting generalizations without the particulars from which they have been deduced, and I would not have adopted a procedure so contrary to my usual practice if it were not that the evidence for my deductions had been fully set forth in the works from which these passages have been detached, and to which I would refer the curious or sceptical reader for more exact information on all points. The volume has been compiled under my direction by my friend Pierre Sayn, who is in large measure responsible both for the choice of the passages and for the order in which they are arranged. I am grateful to him for the taste and judgement, as well as for the diligence and accuracy, with which he has performed his task, and I cannot but admire the skill with which he has pieced the fragments together into a mosaic of a regular pattern. I have added some passages, shifted a few, and prefixed titles