The first group is by far the larger one.  Our imitation of the emotions which we see expressed brings vividness and affective tone into our grasping of the play’s action.  We sympathize with the sufferer and that means that the pain which he expresses becomes our own pain.  We share the joy of the happy lover and the grief of the despondent mourner, we feel the indignation of the betrayed wife and the fear of the man in danger.  The visual perception of the various forms of expression of these emotions fuses in our mind with the conscious awareness of the emotion expressed; we feel as if we were directly seeing and observing the emotion itself.  Moreover the idea awakens in us the appropriate reactions.  The horror which we see makes us really shrink, the happiness which we witness makes us relax, the pain which we observe brings contractions in our muscles; and all the resulting sensations from muscles, joints, tendons, from skin and viscera, from blood circulation and breathing, give the color of living experience to the emotional reflection in our mind.  It is obvious that for this leading group of emotions the relation of the pictures to the feelings of the persons in the play and to the feelings of the spectator is exactly the same.  If we start from the emotions of the audience, we can say that the pain and the joy which the spectator feels are really projected to the screen, projected both into the portraits of the persons and into the pictures of the scenery and background into which the personal emotions radiate.  The fundamental principle which we recognized for all the other mental states is accordingly no less efficient in the case of the spectator’s emotions.

The analysis of the mind of the audience must lead, however, to that second group of emotions, those in which the spectator responds to the scenes on the film from the standpoint of his independent affective life.  We see an overbearing pompous person who is filled with the emotion of solemnity, and yet he awakens in us the emotion of humor.  We answer by our ridicule.  We see the scoundrel who in the melodramatic photoplay is filled with fiendish malice, and yet we do not respond by imitating his emotion; we feel moral indignation toward his personality.  We see the laughing, rejoicing child who, while he picks the berries from the edge of the precipice, is not aware that he must fall down if the hero does not snatch him back at the last moment.  Of course, we feel the child’s joy with him.  Otherwise we should not even understand his behaviour, but we feel more strongly the fear and the horror of which the child himself does not know anything.  The photoplaywrights have so far hardly ventured to project this second class of emotion, which the spectator superadds to the events, into the show on the screen.  Only tentative suggestions can be found.  The enthusiasm or the disapproval or indignation of the spectator is sometimes released in the lights and shades and in the setting of the landscape.  There