 Since the nineteenth century, academics in various disciplines have employed the term "magic" but have defined it in different ways and used it in reference to different things.One approach, associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor (1832-1917) and James G. Frazer (1854-1941), uses the term to describe beliefs in hidden sympathies between objects that allow one to influence the other.Defined in this way, magic is portrayed as the opposite to science.