It is pleasant to turn to the work of a
sociologist who is also a philosopher; and who is consequently able to make clear to his readers the principles he is adopting in his work. In The Meaning of Sacrifice (Hogarth Press, Itis.) Dr. Money-Kyde examines a wide variety of sacrificial rites and most ingeniously interprets them in terms of orthodox Freudian doctrine. In doing so he carries the theory of paerifice suggested in Freud's Totem and Tabu into a much wider field. To Dr. Money-Kyrle all sacrificial rites are the symbolic expression of the desire of the adolescent male to rid himself of the Father who, though loved as the ideal of manhood, is also hated as a rival who stands in the way of the realization of his desires. Living in a community, this " ambivalent " feeling towards the Father becomes transferred to the God, and the desire to kill the Father finds symbolic expression in the sacrifice of the God. With the sacrifice, a sense of fear and guilt arises which prompts further rites of penitence, atonement and sharing of guilt. The diversity of sacrificial rites is so great that any analysis which reduces them all to a single principle cannot but seem somewhat arbitrary. It is much to the credit of Dr. Money-Kyrle's clearness of thought and style that in making such an analysis he succeeds in holding the reader's interest without unduly provoking his indignation. It is; nevertheless, a pity that on such a controversial subject, lie has adhered so closely to the strictly deductive method of presentation and has not stopped to consider the possibility of any other motives being at work in sacrificial rites. Though the book is most interesting as a piece of advocacy for psycho-analytic doctrine, it cannot convince the reader that the problem of sacrifice has been approached with the objective impartiality which is essential to any truly scientific investigation.
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