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Page 13
We are familiar with the illusions in which we believe that we see
something which only our imagination supplies. If an unfamiliar printed
word is exposed to our eye for the twentieth part of a second, we
readily substitute a familiar word with similar letters. Everybody knows
how difficult it is to read proofs. We overlook the misprints, that is,
we replace the wrong letters which are actually in our field of vision
by imaginary right letters which correspond to our expectations. Are we
not also familiar with the experience of supplying by our fancy the
associative image of a movement when only the starting point and the end
point are given, if a skillful suggestion influences our mind. The
prestidigitator stands on one side of the stage when he apparently
throws the costly watch against the mirror on the other side of the
stage; the audience sees his suggestive hand movement and the
disappearance of the watch and sees twenty feet away the shattering of
the mirror. The suggestible spectator cannot help seeing the flight of
the watch across the stage.
The recent experiments by Wertheimer and Korte have gone into still
subtler details. Both experimenters worked with a delicate instrument in
which two light lines on a dark ground could be exposed in very quick
succession and in which it was possible to vary the position of the
lines, the distance of the lines, the intensity of their light, the time
exposure of each, and the time between the appearance of the first and
of the second. They studied all these factors, and moreover the
influence of differently directed attention and suggestive attitude. If
a vertical line is immediately followed by a horizontal, the two
together may give the impression of one right angle. If the time between
the vertical and the horizontal line is long, first one and then the
other is seen. But at a certain length of the time interval, a new
effect is reached. We see the vertical line falling over and lying flat
like the horizontal line. If the eyes are fixed on the point in the
midst of the angle, we might expect that this movement phenomenon would
stop, but the opposite is the case. The apparent movement from the
vertical to the horizontal has to pass our fixation point and it seems
that we ought now to recognize clearly that there is nothing between
those two positions, that the intermediate phases of the movement are
lacking; and yet the experiment shows that under these circumstances we
frequently get the strongest impression of motion. If we use two
horizontal lines, the one above the other, we see, if the right time
interval is chosen, that the upper one moves downward toward the lower.
But we can introduce there a very interesting variation. If we make the
lower line, which appears objectively after the upper one, more intense,
the total impression is one which begins with the lower. We see first
the lower line moving toward the upper one which also approaches the
lower; and then follows the second phase in which both appear to fall
down to the position of the lower one. It is not necessary to go further
into details in order to demonstrate that the apparent movement is in no
way the mere result of an afterimage and that the impression of motion
is surely more than the mere perception of successive phases of
movement. The movement is in these cases not really seen from without,
but is superadded, by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures.
The statement that our impression of movement does not result simply
from the seeing of successive stages but includes a higher mental act
into which the successive visual impressions enter merely as factors is
in itself not really an explanation. We have not settled by it the
nature of that higher central process. But it is enough for us to see
that the impression of the continuity of the motion results from a
complex mental process by which the various pictures are held together
in the unity of a higher act. Nothing can characterize the situation
more clearly than the fact which has been demonstrated by many
experiments, namely, that this feeling of movement is in no way
interfered with by the distinct consciousness that important phases of
the movement are lacking. On the contrary, under certain circumstances
we become still more fully aware of this apparent motion created by our
inner activity when we are conscious of the interruptions between the
various phases of movement.
We come to the consequences. What is then the difference between seeing
motion in the photoplay and seeing it on the real stage? There on the
stage where the actors move the eye really receives a continuous series.
Each position goes over into the next without any interruption. The
spectator receives everything from without and the whole movement which
he sees is actually going on in the world of space without and
accordingly in his eye. But if he faces the film world, _the motion
which he sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own
mind_. The afterimages of the successive pictures are not sufficient to
produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential
condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate
phases in the idea of connected action. Thus we have reached the exact
counterpart of our results when we analyzed the perception of depth. We
see actual depth in the pictures, and yet we are every instant aware
that it is not real depth and that the persons are not really plastic.
It is only a suggestion of depth, a depth created by our own activity,
but not actually seen, because essential conditions for the true
perception of depth are lacking. Now we find that the movement too is
perceived but that the eye does not receive the impressions of true
movement. It is only a suggestion of movement, 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.
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