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.
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