Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/891

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 857

the trusts. Publicity is an excellent condition to impose upon commerce, but, if trusts are in any sense a natural product of existing economic forces' it will facilitate rather than impede their growth and strength. The other notion that of forcing competition upon businesses whose interests and tendencies favor com- bination, is destined equally to prove futile. The real significance of the trust situation lies, as has already been pointed out, in the economic facts of control of supply, the tariff, patents and franchises, and, finally, the power of massed capital. J. A. HOBSON, in Economic Review for January, 1904.

E. B. W.

Theory of Knowledge of Primitive Thought The philosophy of practical life distinguishes the ideas of human consciousness as subjective and objective ; dreams, hallucinations, etc., on the one hand, and solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies^ on the other. But the assumption that the opposition between subjective and objective is one which cannot be bridged over has long ago been given up by science, which explains the apparent opposition by asserting the original sub- jectivity of ideas and their derived objectivity, or vice versa.

In the primitive philosophies, however, the distinction was not drawn between the subjective and the objective, but rather between the tangible and the intangible, the existent and the non-existent, the material and the immaterial. For it is clear that mankind would have succumbed if it had made no distinction between per- ception, dreams, apparances, etc., and the theory of knowledge has developed in necessarily close relations to the other sides of the spiritual life.

The idea of the deception of the senses was lacking in primitive man, although self-preservation forced him to distinguish between the branch and its reflection in the water. To him, however, each was real ; the one belonged to the world of tangible things subject to his will, the other to the realm of the intangible and the immaterial. Smoke, mist, and air in motion have played a major role in the evolution of notions of the immaterial world. The grayish-white or black of mist or smoke furnishes a basis for ideas of ghosts, while, on a somewhat higher plane, spiritual beings lose visibility and finally, according to a still more advanced con- ception, are deprived also of extension and localization in space.

In a similar way, the savage mind reckoned shadows, dreams, and visions as real, but immaterial manifestations, and in no sense as subjective in our use of the term. Natural selection has obviously resulted in the survival of only those men who distinguished between the object and its appearance shadow, reflection, or picture. Pictures and images, to the savage mind, are closely connected with the immaterial world ; they are oftenest representations of the gods or of departed ancestors or ancestral spirits.

The fanciful and mythical compositions of the savage are, at least to him, neither fanciful nor mythical ; they are a sober, traditional account of the imma- terial. Today poetry is for us the play of the imagination, it is purely subjective ; but in primitive times such was not altogether the case ; it was in part a very real report of that which transcended the senses. (To be concluded.) P. BECK, " Erkenntnistheorie des primitiven Denkens," in Zeltschrift fiir Philosophic und philosophische Kritik, Vol. CXXIII, No. 2 (1904). E- B. W.

Immigration and the Public Health. The popular belief that immigration constitutes a menace to the public health is not without foundation. With the change in the racial character of immigration, most marked in the past decade, a pronounced deterioration in the general physique of the immigrants, and a much higher percentage of loathsome and dangerous disease, are noticeable. Thousands of immigrants of poor physique are recorded as such by the medical inspectors at Ellis Island, but under the present law they must be admitted unless it appears that the physical defect noted will make the immigrant a public charge ; and, owing to the latitude allowed by the phrase " likely to become a public charge," the poor physique is usually overlooked.

The real danger to the public health is greatly increased by the fact that those classes of immigrants whose vitality is lowest are the ones which congregate in the