Abstract
THESE five lectures have a certain interest as illustrating the contemporary tendency to strengthen older feelings and institutions by an infusion of science. Mr. Lewis is a student and a tutor of anthropology and also minister in a Welsh church. The last generation tended to shut the door of the laboratory when it went to the oratory: this one, including Mr. Lewis, tries rather to make passages between them. It is a wholesome change, but difficult to carry out, and liable to deform one or other of the structures thus connected. In this case the account of religion which results would not satisfy the more thoroughgoing students of religion. Mr. Lewis tells us that he is more and more convinced that the “premier motive of religion is the passion for life”, but this definition, though containing a large element of truth, is both too wide and too narrow. The ‘passion for life’, being a general animal, or even biological, characteristic, can scarcely be taken as the differentia of the religious impulse in man, while, on the other hand, the study of religion reveals other, perhaps equally potent, elements in its genesis fear, for example, awe, and, above all, the social nexus, which, though cognate, cannot be identified with ‘the passion for life’.
The Passion for Life.
Rev. John Lewis. (Published on the Foundation established in Memory of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College.) Pp. x + 123. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1928.) 9s. net.
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M., F. The Passion for Life . Nature 126, 307–308 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126307c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126307c0
