Symbolism and Belief

SYMBOLISM AND BELIEF by EDWYN BEVAN London GEORGE ALLEN UNWIN LTD Museum Street TO MY FRIEND ALFRED EDWARD TAYLOR without whose prompting and encouragement these lectures would never have been written PREFACE JL HE lectures contained in this volume were given for the University of Edinburgh on Lord Giffords founda tion In the years 1933 and 1934. I have delayed their publication in the hope that with process of time I might, by further reading and thought, be able to expand and modify them, so as to make them more worthy of presen tation to the public in the form of a book. This hope has been so meagrely realized that it now seems best to let them go forth, with all their imperfections on their head, hardly at all altered from the form in which they were delivered. Some changes in arrangement have been made in the order of lectures the two on Time now follow immediately the two on the spatial symbol of Height. Four lectures have been omitted altogether from the present volume, those on image-worship and doctrines ondemning the manufacture of images in antiquity and in the Christian Church. Since in the rest of the lectures ihe symbolism of material objects in worship was not the kind of symbolism under consideration, these four lectures seemed somewhat of a digression from the main ine of argument. I hope later on to issue them as a small book by themselves. As is generally known, Lord Giffords Will prescribes hat lecturers on his foundation are not to ask their iudience to believe any statement on the ground of any special revelation, whether contained in Scripture or the iogma of a Church, but to rest what they affirm solely upon grounds of reason. That is to say, their basis must be the facts of the world so far as they are accessible to the reason common to mankind. I hope that I have nowhere transgressed this restriction imposed t by the munificent benefactor to whom these lectures owe their existence. Of course beliefs entertained by the Christian Church,...