of an original universal stage of savagery, whence civilised races
inherit their incredibly repulsive myths, why, in pp. 197, 198, does he
denounce that very postulate as not proven, not capable of being proved,
very mischievous, and one of the evils resulting from our method of
comparing savage and civilised rites and beliefs? I must be permitted to
complain that I do not know which is Mr. Max Muller's real opinion--that
given with such hearty conviction in p. 15, or that stated with no less
earnestness in pp. 197, 198. I trust that I shall not be thought to
magnify a mere slip of the pen. Both passages--though, as far as I can
see, self-contradictory--appear to be written with the same absence of
levity. Fontenelle, I own, speaks of Greeks, not Semites, as being
originally savages. But I pointed out {124} that he considered it safer
to 'hedge' by making an exception of the Israelites. There is really
nothing in Genesis against the contention that the naked, tool-less,
mean, and frivolous Adam was a savage.

The Fallacy of 'Admits'

As the purpose of this essay is mainly logical, I may point out the
existence of a fallacy not marked, I think, in handbooks of Logic. This
is the fallacy of saying that an opponent 'admits' what, on the contrary,
he has been the first to point out and proclaim. He is thus suggested
into an attitude which is the reverse of his own. Some one--I am sorry
to say that I forget who he was--showed me that Fontenelle, in De
l'Origine des Fables, {125a} briefly stated the anthropological theory of
the origin of myths, or at least of that repulsive element in them which
'makes mythology mythological,' as Mr. Max Muller says. I was glad to
have a predecessor in a past less remote than that of Eusebius of
Caesarea. 'A briefer and better system of mythology,' I wrote, 'could
not be devised; but the Mr. Casaubons of this world have neglected it,
and even now it is beyond their comprehension.' {125b} To say this in
this manner is not to '_admit_ that we have not got much beyond
Fontenelle.' I do not want to get beyond Fontenelle. I want to go back
to his 'forgotten common-sense,' and to apply his ideas with method and
criticism to a range of materials which he did not possess or did not
investigate.

Now, on p. 15, Mr. Max Muller had got as far as accepting Fontenelle; on
pp. 197, 198 he burns, as it were, that to which he had 'gladly
subscribed.'

Conclusion as to our Metho