Recognizing legends with superseded hypotheses was the center of James George Frazer's The Golden Bough: an examination in similar religion, first distributed in 1890, in which the late-Victorian Scottish anthropologist found mythic reasoning in the outset of the human species. Frazer drew intensely on crafted by the French positivist rationalist Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who trusted that human idea experienced three stages: religious, supernatural and logical. Having a place in the first of these stages, the narrative of Adam and Eve was a theory that could be disposed of now that reality had been found by Darwin. In this view, which appears to be plainly obvious to the "new agnostics" who are right now selling a warmed adaptation of it, religion is just a crude kind of science. However the positivist idea that fantasies are crude types of thought is itself greatly crude. As Wittgenstein place it in an address on religion, "Frazer is considerably more savage than a large portion of his savages… His clarifications of crude observances are substantially cruder than the importance of the observances themselves."
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