t, and the idea of motion is
to a high degree the product of our own reaction. _Depth and movement
alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a
mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the
things. We invest the impressions with them._ The theater has both depth
and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and yet
lacks them. We see things distant and moving, but we furnish to them
more than we receive; we create the depth and the continuity through our
mental mechanism.

CHAPTER IV

ATTENTION

The mere perception of the men and women and of the background, with all
their depth and their motion, furnishes only the material. The scene
which keeps our interest alive certainly involves much more than the
simple impression of moving and distant objects. We must accompany those
sights with a wealth of ideas. They must have a meaning for us, they
must be enriched by our own imagination, they must awaken the remnants
of earlier experiences, they must stir up our feelings and emotions,
they must play on our suggestibility, they must start ideas and
thoughts, they must be linked in our mind with the continuous chain of
the play, and they must draw our attention constantly to the important
and essential element of the action. An abundance of such inner
processes must meet the world of impressions and the psychological
analysis has only started when perception of depth and movement alone
are considered. If we hear Chinese, we perceive the sounds, but there is
no inner response to the words; they are meaningless and dead for us; we
have no interest in them. If we hear the same thoughts expressed in our
mother tongue, every syllable carries its meaning and message. Then we
are readily inclined to fancy that this additional significance which
belongs to the familiar language and which is absent from the foreign
one is something which comes to us in the perception itself as if the
meaning too were passing through the channels of our ears. But
psychologically the meaning is ours. In learning the language we have
learned to add associations and reactions of our own to the sounds which
we perceive. It is not different with the optical perceptions. The best
does not come from without.

Of all internal functions which create the meaning of the world around
us, the most central is the attention. The chaos of the surrounding
impressions is organized into a re