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.'