Bevan, Edwyn. Symbolism and Belief. [New York:  The Macmillan Company. $5.00.]

The foundation of this volume stems from the Gifford lectures given at Edinburgh in 1933-1934. As originally founded the intention of the

donor was to have quite orthodox expositions of religious principles as of his day. His will fortunately left the way open for developmental trends in theological thinking and the more recent Gifford lectures have reflected such tendencies.

Here a short introduction on the meaning of the word symbolism while not in direct line with the psychoanalytic dynamic conception is near enough to permit of considerable latitude of phrasing to offend neither the ultra orthodox nor the radical. The author neatly disposes of the bugaboo term ‘anthropomorphism’ as good or bad not as something intrinsically wrong in the term. Everything that man does stems from his anthropomorphism—his humanism—or his self, hence the problem is to judge as to the validity of the particular aspect given to any special anthropomorphism.

Height and length of life are two special attributes of the Divinity in orthodox theology. Their symbolic significance is the issue here intelligently discussed. Originally the Sky God as a Person was a projection “up there” and as primitives gave ‘consciousness’ to all things, animate as well as inanimate, naturally ‘up there’ joined in the procession and Jehovistic qualities naturally adhered to the conception. Our author traces these throughout the earlier religious conceptions of primary primitives, before projection took place to the later developments of the projection mechanism.

We are not using the author's own words here, but rather interpolating the psychoanalytic conception. All that our author does is to summarize the early psychological beliefs, and he does it in a very instructive and capable manner. Schilder would probably summarize most of it as ‘projection of the body image’ with symbolization of the various aspects of that same image. Because of the universality of the beliefs our author rather naïvely assumes ther