The discovery of the objective, external world is a secondary phenomenon, the result of human consciousness endeavouring, with infinite labour and the help of the instruments and abstractions of modern science, to grasp the object as such, independently of the primary reality of man, which is the reality of the psyche. But early man relates himself above all to this primary reality of psychic dominants, archetypes, primordial images, instincts, and patterns of behaviour. This reality is the object of his science, and his efforts to deal with it in his cults and rituals were just as successful in controlling the inner forces of the unconscious as are modern man's efforts to control and manipulate the forces of the physical world.

The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann