Let us briefly recall the situation. The house is darkened and quiet; all lines converge to the stage, which is brightly lighted, and heightened in visual effect by every device known to art. The onlooker's mind is emptied of its content; all feeling of self is pushed down to its very lowest level. He has before him a situation which he understands through sight and hearing, and in which he follows the action not only by comprehension, but by instinctive imitation. This is the great vehicle of suggestion. We cannot see tears rise without moisture in our own eyes; we reproduce a yawn even against our will; the sudden or the regular movement of a companion we are forced to follow, at least incipiently. Now the expression which we imitate brings up in us to a certain extent the whole complex of ideas and feeling-tones belonging to that expression. Moreover, the more closely we attend to it, the more explicitly do we imitate it, by an evident psychological principle. Thus in the artificially contrived situation of the spectator at a play, he is forced, not only to understand intellectually, but also to FOLLOW, quite literally, the emotional movements of the actors. The process of understanding, raised to the highest pitch, involves by its very nature also reproduction of what is understood. The complex of the ideas and associations of the persons of the play is ideally reproduced. Are not the organic reactions belonging to these set up too?--not directly, in response to a situation in which the spectator may act, but directly, by reproduction of the mental contents of one who may act, the person of the drama. The final answer to this question contains, to my mind, the whole kernel of the dramatic mystery, and the starting-point for an aesthetic theory of tragedy. IV Every play contains at least two actors. The suggestion of states of mind does not come from the hero alone, but is given by two persons, or groups of persons, at once. These persons are, normally, in conflict. Othello menaces, Desdemona shrinks; Nora asserts her right, Hilmar his claim; L'Aiglon vaunts his inherited personality, Metternich--holds the candle to the mirror! But what of the spectator? He cannot at once shrink and menace, assert and deny, as the conditions of sympathetic reproduction would seem to demand. Real emotion implies a definite set of reactions of the nature of movements; and two opposed movements cannot take place at the same time. Ideas, however, can dwell together in amity. The spectator has a vivid picture of Othello and Desdemona together; but his reactions have neutralized each other, and his emotions, lacking their organic conditions, are in abeyance.