But the theater is bound not only by space and time.  Whatever it shows is controlled by the same laws of causality which govern nature.  This involves a complete continuity of the physical events:  no cause without following effect, no effect without preceding cause.  This whole natural course is left behind in the play on the screen.  The deviation from reality begins with that resolution of the continuous movement which we studied in our psychological discussions.  We saw that the impression of movement results from an activity of the mind which binds the separate pictures together.  What we actually see is a composite; it is like the movement of a fountain in which every jet is resolved into numberless drops.  We feel the play of those drops in their sparkling haste as one continuous stream of water, and yet are conscious of the myriads of drops, each one separate from the others.  This fountainlike spray of pictures has completely overcome the causal world.

In an entirely different form this triumph over causality appears in the interruption of the events by pictures which belong to another series.  We find this whenever the scene suddenly changes.  The processes are not carried to their natural consequences.  A movement is started, but before the cause brings its results another scene has taken its place.  What this new scene brings may be an effect for which we saw no causes.  But not only the processes are interrupted.  The intertwining of the scenes which we have traced in detail is itself such a contrast to causality.  It is as if different objects could fill the same space at the same time.  It is as if the resistance of the material world had disappeared and the substances could penetrate one another.  In the interlacing of our ideas we experience this superiority to all physical laws.  The theater would not have even the technical means to give us such impressions, but if it had, it would have no right to make use of them, as it would destroy the basis on which the drama is built.  We have only another case of the same type in those series of pictures which aim to force a suggestion on our mind.  We have spoken of them.  A certain effect is prepared by a chain of causes and yet when the causal result is to appear the film is cut off.  We have the causes without the effect.  The villain thrusts with his dagger—­but a miracle has snatched away his victim.

While the moving pictures are lifted above the world of space and time and causality and are freed from its bounds, they are certainly not without law. We said before that the freedom with which the pictures replace one another is to a large degree comparable to the sparkling and streaming of the musical tones.  The yielding to the play of the mental energies, to the attention and emotion, which is felt in the film pictures, is still more complete in the musical melodies and harmonies in which the tones themselves are merely the expressions of the ideas and feelings and will