Footnote ip18

ip18. The notion often found in philosophy that "like attracts like" appears to arise from the related assumptions of sympathetic magic. Even the notion that matter, of itself, cannot think is a consequence of that notion. That is, matter attracts matter; spirit attracts spirit.

On the human propensity for sympathetic magic, James Frazer writes,

Here what I wish to impress on you is not so much the difference between the theory and the practice of magic as the distinction between the principles of thought that respectively underlie the two branches of magic which I have called Homœopathic and Contagious. Both principles turn out on analysis to be merely two different misapplications of the association of ideas. Homœopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity; contagious magic is founded on the association of ideas by contiguity. Homœopathic magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which resemble each other are the same; contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have once been in contact with each other are always in contact. But in practice the two branches of magic are often combined ; or, to be more exact, while homœopathic or imitative magic may be practised by itself, contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of the homœopathic or imitative principle. Thus abstractly stated, the two things may be a little difficult to grasp. You will readily understand them when they are illustrated by concrete examples. Both trains of thought are in fact extremely simple and elementary. It could hardly be otherwise, since they are familiar in the concrete, though certainly not in the abstract, to the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere. Both branches of magic, the homœopathic and the contagious, may conveniently be comprehended under the general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from the one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a sort of invisible ether, not unlike that which, I understand, is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty.

Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship
by James Frazer
(Macmillan 1905)

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