Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/580

 564 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

men and of natives during their head-hunting expeditions. Fines of so many pigs in earlier days let them to value white men in terms of pigs. The presence of a man-of-war sent them to the bush. Severe measures had to be adopted. Accord- ing to Dr. Codrington, the Solomon Islanders are ancestor-worshipers. They put the head of a chief in a basket and house, call it a tindalo, and " believe every tindalo was once a man." Admiral Davis destroyed these cairns or tindalos. It is evident that in so doing he was inflicting on the natives the severest punishment possible, and one which robbed them of their " natural calls for help in danger and distress." Man, published under the direction of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, September, 1904. H. E. F.

The Ideality of the ./Esthetic Feelings. Since Schiller coined the expres- sion "das Ideal und das Leben " (ideal and life), "the ideality of the aesthetic feelings " has been the usual term for the effect of art. So it is customary to speak of the ideal and apparent feelings which art is producing as opposed to real feelings. It is said that art produces no feeling, but merely a representation of a feeling.

Witasek in his psychological analyses is probably the most important follower of ideality, declaring that art does not create any feelings, but merely imaginations of feelings. I maintain that in appreciating a work of art I do not only represent the feeling, but have it

Feeling in art-appreciation is either abstract thinking, as in science, or pure feeling, vivid passionate excitement, as in ordinary life-affairs. This is a dilemma, from which there is no way out as long as we compare the effect of art and the effect of life in their totalities. But, comparing their single elements, we see that some of those in life are present in the work of art, and some are missing. The whole of the effect of art can be different from life and still be analogous.

A psychological analysis of the effect of art and the effect of life shows the wealth of feelings in our moods, and that, if our feeling depended on reality, it would never extend to nature and to fiction, concerning which we have, in fact, most feeling. Feeling does not proceed along lines so logical as to depend on reality.

It is easier to dissolve into feeling over a fantasy artistically created than over a real person. Figures of art do not touch our sphere of volition, and sym- pathy for their vicissitudes is selfless. Only in art can I so dissolve myself in another that the recognition of my own personality, against which the other stands as a stranger, disappears entirely, and the limit between me and the other falls and I am unified with him. This feeling into the identification of another is the real province of art. For the robber whose adventures we are following on the stage we have this inner feeling. For the robber whose depredations call us from the theater to the street our feeling is aroused because of a real event which puts our volition to the test.

The less we are driven by art to practical, active action, the better we can give ourselves up to the feeling into the represented condition of feelings. Hence, if you separate the single elements of moment in the effects of art, feeling is not silenced by a work of art, but manifested most strongly because it does not share in any impulse of the will. ANNA TUMARKIN, Zeitschrift fur Philosophic und philosophische Kritik, Vol. V, p. 125. H. E. F.

Shortcomings in the Execution of Punishment. The debate in the Reichs- tag on May 13, 1904, has passed by without action. After the enormous agitation of the press over these questions of the punishment and reformation of criminals, this negative outcome is astonishing. But. at any rate, the public is still interested. That there are weaknesses in prison administration will not here be denied. But they are different from those emphasized by the press.

First, there is a lack of balance between the justice of the punishment and its execution. If you hold as the ideal the moral improvement of offenders, then is certainly a shortcoming when, with 75 per cent, of those held in detention for"" short terms of punishment, there is complete or almost complete failure to reach the end. Of punishment and moral betterment one cannot speak reasonably when the imprisonment is from one day to three months. There is only one effect from