Now no doubt in the reality of our experience every action includes many presuppositions which make it a difficult matter to decide the exact point where we may find the true commencement. In so far, however, as dramatic action rests essentially on a definite state of collision, the right point of departure will lie in the situation, out of which the future devolution of that conflict, despite the fact that it has not as yet broken out, will none the less in its further course issue. The end, on the contrary, will then be attained, when the resolution of the discord and its development is secured in every possible respect. In the midway condition between origination and end we have the conflict of ends, and the struggle of individual persons in collision. These different section's are in dramatic composition, so to speak, the phases or moments of the action of what are also actions, and the definition of this is admirably indicated by the _acts_ of the piece. They are now of course more or less equivalent to pauses of time, and a prince on one occasion, who was either in a hurry, or wished the action to proceed without interruption, blamed his chamberlain openly that such a pause occurred. With regard to their _number three_ such acts for every kind of drama is the number that will adapt itself most readily to intelligible theory. Of these the _first_ discloses the appearance of the collision, which is thereupon emphasized in the _second_ with all the animation of conflicting interests as the positive difference of such discord and its progression, until, _finally_, driven as it were upon the very apex of its contradiction, it is necessarily resolved. We may cite--as some kind of illustration of this division which the nature of such an action suggests--from ancient drama, in which no doubt the dramatic articulation is as a rule less distinct, the trilogies of Æschylus, in which each single play combines with the others to form a single and completely exclusive whole.[10] In modern poetry the Spaniards mainly follow such a division into three acts. The English, French, and Germans, on the contrary, for the most part divide the entire play into _five_ acts, in which the initial exposition is assigned to the first, the three next are occupied with the various aggressions and reactionary effects, the complex intentions and conflicts of the opposed parties; and it is not until the fifth that we reach the entire resolution of such contending forces.