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In a brilliant passage which closes the imposing volumes of the “Golden Bough,” Frazer compares the course of human thought to a web composed of three different threads,—the black thread of magic, the red thread of religion, and the white thread of science. These three networks woven by the “humming loom of time” assumed a lighter tint as the white threads of science gradually penetrated the tissue more and more. Finally the progress of human thought culminated in the imposing structure of science as one of the greatest triumphs of the mental evolution of man.
In the history of science, it is very infrequent that a single investigator has been able to inaugurate a new method of research and erect a fundamental structure of general laws. In biology, Darwin was such an investigator; in psychology, Freud originated and developed a dynamic concept of the unconscious, which is in striking contrast to the sterile, static psychology which dominated human thought for centuries. Freud, however, was very careful to point out that psychoanalysis is not a “system” in the philosophical sense and, although it began as a therapeutic procedure, gradually developing into a psychology of the unconscious, yet even this latter has, up to the present, been unable to fulfill its ideal wishes to become a world view of life.
In Freud's recent writings the value and power of the scientific method are eulogized. It is pointed out that the evolution of scientific ideas and discoveries runs parallel with cultural development: