But whether it is used with artistic reserve or with a certain dangerous exaggeration, in any case its psychological meaning is obvious.  It demonstrates to us in a new form the same principle which the perception of depth and of movement, the acts of attention and of memory and of imagination have shown. The objective world is molded by the interests of the mind.  Events which are far distant from one another so that we could not be physically present at all of them at the same time are fusing in our field of vision, just as they are brought together in our own consciousness. Psychologists are still debating whether the mind can ever devote itself to several groups of ideas at the same time.  Some claim that any so-called division of attention is really a rapid alteration.  Yet in any case subjectively we experience it as an actual division.  Our mind is split and can be here and there apparently in one mental act.  This inner division, this awareness of contrasting situations, this interchange of diverging experiences in the soul, can never be embodied except in the photoplay.

An interesting side light falls on this relation between the mind and the pictured scenes, if we turn to a mental process which is quite nearly related to those which we have considered, namely, suggestion.  It is similar in that a suggested idea which awakes in our consciousness is built up from the same material as the memory ideas or the imaginative ideas.  The play of associations controls the suggestions, as it does the reminiscences and fancies.  Yet in an essential point it is quite different.  All the other associative ideas find merely their starting point in those outer impressions.  We see a landscape on the stage or on the screen or in life and this visual perception is the cue which stirs up in our memory or imagination any fitting ideas.  The choice of them, however, is completely controlled by our own interest and attitude and by our previous experiences.  Those memories and fancies are therefore felt as our subjective supplements.  We do not believe in their objective reality.  A suggestion, on the other hand, is forced on us.  The outer perception is not only a starting point but a controlling influence.  The associated idea is not felt as our creation but as something to which we have to submit.  The extreme case is, of course, that of the hypnotizer whose word awakens in the mind of the hypnotized person ideas which he cannot resist.  He must accept them as real, he must believe that the dreary room is a beautiful garden in which he picks flowers.

The spellbound audience in a theater or in a picture house is certainly in a state of heightened suggestibility and is ready to receive suggestions.  One great and fundamental suggestion is working in both cases, inasmuch as the drama as well as the photoplay suggests to the mind of the spectator that this is more than mere play, that it is life which we witness.  But if we go further and ask for the application of