Murray Stein's latest book has its origin in a youthful experience: as a 20-year-old American on the European tour, too poor to be ‘seduced by the sensuous pleasures of the Parisian world’, he came across a copy of Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing. We can be grateful he had no money, since his early discovery has flowered in this excellent amplificatory sketch on the problem of conscience.

Stein treats conscience as an archetypal structure, and identifies its two poles as masculine and feminine, related to the father and the mother. His survey of the