The Need to Believe: The Psychology of Religion. By Mortimer Ostow, M.D. and Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Ph.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1954. 162 pp.

The thesis of this text of one hundred and fifty pages is more or less this: religious feelings are an expression of a need to believe—a need which grows out of the fear of death and out of that general though vague insecurity which our social life generates. This insecurity is a result of the pressure which our instincts exert from within us in their demand for full and unbridled expression. Religious faith acts as a restraint; it is a socializing factor. Thus, religion, or religious faith, or the need to believe, appears to be a phenomenon of biosociological origin—even though religion is not the result of conscious, voluntary organization, but rather a more or less spontaneous response to the insecurities and anxieties which our instincts and the aggregate of our fellow men tend to generate within us. Religion thus relieves us of the pessimism into which we would inevitably fall were it not for the psychological crutch that faith offers us.

Here the issue narrows down to rather minimal and not too enlightening proportions; for it is not then a matter of religion in any specific sense, but religion in a general sense (too general, I am afraid) that the authors begin to talk about—a sort of belief or faith in something. The authors do not state it in this way, but pretty nearly; one of them is, we are told, a student of Bergson's philosophy. Unfortunately, all that is left of Bergson in this book is but an early and incomplete statement that gives a somewhat slanted impression—as if man is driven to religious faith by some special instinct and that (as the authors state time and again) religious faith is essentially a form of adjustment of man to the demands which societies make on him to protect him from himself. 'Believing