Third, the great greedy surge in the decades before World War One on the part of European powers for colonies and markets in what we now call the Third World had as a by-product a torrent of ethnographic information pouring into all the imperial capitals. The new concept of prehistory was gaining acceptance because of the discoveries of the archaeologists, digging in the lands of the known historical civilizations - Greece and Rome, Mesopotamia and Egypt - as well as revealing wholly new cultures, like the Hittites and the civilizations of South America. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the traditional chronology that held that the world was created in 4004 BC was being undermined, the very idea of the dimensions of the past was changing. Second, Frazer, like all scholars, was the intellectual beneficiary of those who had come before him. Here is how Jane Ellen Harrison, a Cambridge classical scholar and a contemporary of Frazer’s, put it in introducing a volume of essays entitled The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religions : “The title of my paper might well have been ‘The Creation by Darwinism of the Scientific Study of Religions’ but that I feared to mar my tribute to a great name by any shadow of exaggeration.” Today all but Scriptural literalists accept Darwinian evolution as both true and all-encompassing. If we rewind back a century to 1909, that fifty-year milestone was also of course marked and celebrated.
In 2009 we marked the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the passage of a hundred and fifty years since the publication of The Origin. Evolution was brand new, and thinking about it meant being forced to re-examine all one’s ideas about the meaning and purpose of life.
But for Frazer’s generation - he was born in 1854 - it wasn’t a topic in a science course or the subject of a TV program as it is today but more like a psychological and moral earthquake.
I assume that everyone here today has grown up with an understanding, at some level of detail, of evolution as the great law of organic life. The first is that evolution was the master idea underlying and pervading the study of all the social sciences in Britain from the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 to at least 1914, along with its associated belief in the seeming inevitability of progress of humanity. Frazer, I’d like to offer a few general observations that should be understood as the basis for everything that follows. Before I turn to the life and work of Sir J.