ABSTRACT
C. S. Lewis originally delivered The Abolition of Man as a set of evening talks-the Riddell Memorial Lectures-at the University of Durham in 1942. He was invited to speak under the general guidelines that he must "treat of the relation between religion and contemporary developments of thought". Earlier in 1931, the British author Aldous Huxley had expressed his unease about implications of the scientific world view in his novel Brave New World. Huxley depicts a fictional human society in which impressive technologies seem to improve the quality of human life and happiness. C. S. Lewis relied on ideas from a number of other thinkers and traditions in The Abolition of Man, constantly referencing the work of others in his text. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis portrays a natural world that is no longer treated as it had a beauty or life of its own worthy of respect-instead, it is there to be used, even destroyed, solely for human purposes.
