in reality in the forms of iambic verse and of
rhymes; they live in color and odor, but their color and odor fade away,
while the roses in the stanzas live on forever. They fancy that the
value of an art depends upon its nearness to the reality of physical
nature.

It has been the chief task of our whole discussion to prove the
shallowness of such arguments and objections. We recognized that art is
a way to overcome nature and to create out of the chaotic material of
the world something entirely new, entirely unreal, which embodies
perfect unity and harmony. The different arts are different ways of
abstracting from reality; and when we began to analyze the psychology of
the moving pictures we soon became aware that the photoplay has a way to
perform this task of art with entire originality, independent of the art
of the theater, as much as poetry is independent of music or sculpture
of painting. It is an art in itself. Only the future can teach us
whether it will become a great art, whether a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a
Mozart, will ever be born for it. Nobody can foresee the directions
which the new art may take. Mere esthetic insight into the principles
can never foreshadow the development in the unfolding of civilization.
Who would have been bold enough four centuries ago to foresee the
musical means and effects of the modern orchestra? Just the history of
music shows how the inventive genius has always had to blaze the path in
which the routine work of the art followed. Tone combinations which
appeared intolerable dissonances to one generation were again and again
assimilated and welcomed and finally accepted as a matter of course by
later times. Nobody can foresee the ways which the new art of the
photoplay will open, but everybody ought to recognize even today that it
is worth while to help this advance and to make the art of the film a
medium for an original creative expression of our time and to mold by it
the esthetic instincts of the millions. Yes, it is a new art--and this
is why it has such fascination for the psychologist who in a world of
ready-made arts, each with a history of many centuries, suddenly finds a
new form still undeveloped and hardly understood. For the first time the
psychologist can observe the starting of an entirely new esthetic
development, a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical
age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art
destined to overcome outer