Note 268 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In 1871 Tylor could still say that “to many educated minds there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature; that our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals.”268 But the old repulsion had already been profoundly impaired by biological and social science; and Tylor’s book met with hardly any of the odium that had been lavished on Darwin and Buckle. “It will make me for the future look on religion—a belief in the soul, etc.—from a different point of view,” wrote Darwin269 to Tylor on its appearance. So thoroughly did the book press home the fact of the evolution of religious thought from savagery that thenceforward the science of mythology, which had never yet risen in professional hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle, began to be decisively adapted to the anthropological standpoint.