Wittgenstein thinks it was wrong of Frazer to respond to the Fire-festivals by launching an investigation into their origins, and of Freud to respond to dreams by looking for causal relations between them and other aspects of our lives. What kind of mistake is this? Is it the same mistake? Is it really a mistake?

Wittgenstein's criticisms of Freud and Frazer have an interest which extends beyond Wittgensteinian exegesis because they raise a much broader problem, which one might formulate as follows:

There are questions which present themselves as empirical, i.e. such that they require further information for their resolution, but with respect to which we are told, or come to feel obscurely ourselves, that this is an illusion, that the consummation we are seeking is not to be found in more empirical knowledge, or via scientific explanation, but elsewhere and otherwise.