Publication of the book Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom by Edward Tylor.
Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist.
+ information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burnett_Tylor
"The thesis which I venture to sustain, within limits, is simply this, that the savage state in some measure represents an early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed or evolved, by processes still in regular operation as of old, the rest showing that, on the whole, progress has far prevailed over relapse.
On this proposition, the main tendency of human society during its long term of existence has been to pass from a savage to a civilized state. [...] Thus the higher culture being clearly traced back to what may be called the middle culture, the question which remains is, whether this middle culture may be traced back to the lower culture, that is, to savagery. To affirm this, is merely to assert that the same kind of development in culture which has gone on inside our range of knowledge has also gone outside it, its course of proceeding being unaffected by our having or not having reporters present. [...] That the tendency of culture has been similar throughout the existence of human society, and that we may fairly judge from its known historic course what its pre-historic course may have been, is a theory clearly entitled to precedence as a fundamental principle of ethnographic research" (pp. 28, 29)
"If we judge the myth of early ages by the unaided power of our modern fancy, we might be left unable to account for their immense effect on the life and belief of mankind. But by the study of such evidence as this, it becomes possible to realize a usual state of the imagination among ancient and savage peoples, intermediate between the conditions of a healthy prosaic modern citizen and of a raving fanatic or a patient in a fever-ward. A poet of our own day has still much in common with the minds of uncultured tribes in the mythological stage of thought. The rude man's imaginations may be narrow, crude, and repulsive, while the poet's more conscious fictions may be highly wrought into sales of fresh artistic beauty, but both share in that sense of the reality of ideas, which fortunately or unfortunately modern education has proved so powerful to destroy. The change of meaning of a single word will tell the history of this transition, ranging from primeval to modern thought. From first to last, the processes of phantasy have been at work; but where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has come to amuse himself with fancies" (p. 284)