Science & Tech Quote by James G. Frazer

Frazer’s line lands like a polite warning shot at his own tribe: the people paid to explain humanity keep flattening it. By pairing “man of science” with “man of letters,” he refuses the usual culture-war split between lab coats and aesthetes. Both camps, he suggests, share the same professional deformation: the habit of treating “mankind” as a clean concept rather than a messy crowd of contradictory motives, rituals, fears, and improvisations.

The key phrase is “too apt” - not an outright condemnation, but an admission of structural bias. Abstraction is not a personal failing; it’s the toolset. Scientists isolate variables; writers isolate themes. Frazer’s subtext is that method itself seduces you into reduction, because a single-sided model is easier to argue, publish, and defend. The quiet sting sits in “selecting... only a single side,” a charge of cherry-picking dressed up as scholarly procedure.

Context matters: Frazer, famous for comparative anthropology in The Golden Bough, worked in an era hungry for grand unifying theories of religion and “primitive” culture. Those projects often turned living societies into illustrative data points for a Western narrative of progress. This sentence reads as self-scrutiny from someone who built sweeping frameworks and knew their cost. It’s also a plea for intellectual humility: the closer you get to a total theory of humans, the more likely you’ve edited out the very thing you claim to study - our many-sidedness, the parts that don’t behave, don’t generalize, don’t fit.