Plot, then, is what makes a play “complete and whole”; it is a planned sequence of actions. Aristotle’s terms connote, not space and structure, but time and causal movement. The beginning is the point at which the cause is set in motion; the end is the result; the middle is the course from the one to the other. Plot is thus a significant course of action determined by permanent impulses; it imitates, not the mere surface movements of life, but its undercurrents. It is not a “slice of life,” such as the experience of this day or that, but a course of life, moving from a “serious” crisis of determining emotions, through actions that carry these emotions out, to the final action in which they are seen to issue. Plot gives us what we often miss in actual experience, and consequently seek in the vicarious experience of drama, a sense of progress to completion. Experience is interrupted and complicated; drama moves steadily on a single course. Plot is the means by which dramatic art simplifies life, in order from the facts of life to extract the truth. Furthermore, plot means technically management of a significant course of action within a practicable time. The tragedy must be long enough to show the action as progressive, yet short enough to be grasped as a single whole. “Beginning, end, middle” are thus very practical considerations. Every playwright considers every plot in this aspect. Where is he to take hold in order to make the situation clear? What final action is, for his conception, the inevitable end? What are the stages between, leading one to another, in which the action will best be seen as a progressive course? Without limiting his consideration to the time-rules of the actual dramatic competitions of his day, Aristotle seeks the limit determined by the very nature of the act; the greater, within the limits of clearness, the finer by its scope. To define roughly, that scope is sufficient within which the sequence of events according to probability or necessity may change from ill fortune to good, or from good to ill.[26] What Aristotle finds necessary is time enough to make the action convincing, to carry out the dramatic consequences to their conclusion. Compressed within too short a time-lapse, the plot may remain fragmentary; stretched out too long, it may sag or trail. “Beginning, end, middle,” then, constitute a formula for plot. A plot does not gain unity by being, as some think, all about one person.... For as in the other imitative arts, the imitation is unified by being of one thing, so also the plot, since it is an imitation of an action, must be the imitation of an action which is one and entire and whose parts are so composed of acts that the transposition or omission of any part would disjoin and dislocate the whole [That, indeed is what we mean by a part]; for a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference is no part of the whole.