There is a great need for a book dealing fully with the bearing of psycho-analysis on religion, but no one could maintain that the volume here reviewed in any way meets this need. There are several reasons for this.

In the first place, the days are long past when one could think it possible to make a psychological study of any obscure group of mental processes by supposedly intellectual approach. Without empathy and sympathy one will not go far in understanding. Still less hope is there if the intellectual approach is, as here, accompanied by the most visible signs of antagonism. It is easy to surmise how far anyone would get in the unravelling of such subtle motivations as lead to—let us say—necrophilia,