It must not be supposed that Sir James Frazer has ignored the two points of view with which I am at present concerned. He takes what he considers "the only reasonable and probable view," which is "that in attempting to account for any particular case of resemblance which may be traced between the customs and beliefs of different races, it would be futile to appeal to the general principle either of transmission or of independent origin; each case must be judged on its own merits after an impartial scrutiny of the facts and referred to the one or the other principle, or possibly to a combination of the two, according as the balance of evidence inclines to the one side or to the other, or hangs evenly between them."[1]
There may be social customs based on social conditions which may very well have arisen independently as the conditions themselves have done; for example, ultimo-geniture, cousin-marriage, and others. The stories of the creation of man out of clay have such a remarkable distribution that it would not be surprising if this very natural supposition had occasionally occurred independently; but, even so, there are large areas over which they are spread through which a cultural connection can be traced, and therefore in these cases transmission must be assumed. Indeed, as I have already stated, an explanation by independent origin is the easiest way out of a difficulty, but it is at the same time sterile and tends to discourage the power of making those hypotheses which are the salt of intellectual life.
- ↑ J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, i. London, 1918, p. 106.
