"But the “furious” generation did not want to tarry in positivist particularism, for they thought they now had the materials and expertise to tackle big questions. The biggest of these was the one ethnographers had failed to answer, classicists had ignored, and positivist orientalists had sidelined since the 1820s: that was, of course, Creuzer’s classic question, the question of the geographical origins of all myths, religions, and symbols, or, put differently, the question of the West’s cultural dependence on the East."