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 Müller says. I was glad to have a predecessor in a past less remote than that of Eusebius of Cæsarea. ‘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 Müller had got as far as accepting Fontenelle; on pp. 197, 198 he burns, as it were, that to which he had ‘gladly subscribed.’