’Even Mr. A. Lang has to admit that we have not got much beyond
   Fontenelle, when he wrote in the last century: 

’"Why are the legends [myths] about men, beasts, and gods so wildly incredible and revolting? . . .  The answer is that the earliest men were in a state of almost inconceivable ignorance and savagery, and that the Greeks inherited their myths from people in the same savage stage (en un pareil etat de sauvagerie).  Look at the Kaffirs and Iroquois if you want to know what the earliest men were like, and remember that the very Iroquois and Kaffirs have a long past behind them"’—­that is to say, are polite and cultivated compared to the earliest men of all.

Here is an uncompromising statement by Fontenelle of the postulate that the Greeks (an Aryan people) must have passed through the same stage as modern savages—­Kaffirs and Iroquois—­now occupy.  But (i. 15) Mr. Max Muller eagerly accepts the postulate:—­

’There is not a word of Fontenelle’s to which I should not gladly subscribe; there is no advice of his which I have not tried to follow in all my attempts to explain the myths of India and Greece by an occasional reference to Polynesian or African folklore.’

Well, if Mr. Max Muller ‘gladly subscribes,’ in p. 15, to the postulate 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