The history of philosophy is an organic development from an objective to a subjective view of life, with a traditional middle period in which subjective and objective mingle. Ancient thought is properly called _objective_, the mediæval _traditional_, the modern _subjective_. Can we briefly suggest what these abstract terms mean? By the _objectivity of ancient thought_ is meant that the ancient, in making his reflections upon life, starts from the universe as a whole. From this outer point of view he tries to see the interconnections between things. Nature is reality; men and gods are a part of nature. Man’s mental processes even are a part of the totality of things. Even ethically man is not an independent individual, but the member of a state. When the ancient came to make distinctions between mind and matter, he did not think of man as the knower in antithesis to matter as the object known, but he thought of mind and matter as parts of one cosmos. The antithesis in ancient thought is rather between appearances and essence, between non-realities and realities with differing emphasis. The ancient attempts speculatively to reconstruct his world, but it is always from the point of view of the world. By the _traditionalism of mediæval thought_ is meant that men are controlled in their thinking by a set of authoritative doctrines from the past. In the Middle Ages, as the mediæval period is called, the independent thinking of antiquity had ceased. Men reflected and reflected deeply, but they were constrained by a set of religious traditions. Authority was placed above them and censored their thinking. The objective Christian church and its authority took the place of the objective Greek cosmos. That church had certain infallible dogma, and thinking was allowed only in so far as it clarified dogma. On the other hand, when we say that _modern thought is subjective_, we refer to an entire change in the centre of intellectual gravity. The starting-point is not the world, but the individual. The universe is set over against mind (dualism), or is the creation of mind (idealism). In any case the modern man looks upon the universe as his servant, the standard of truth to be found in himself and not in something external. The subject as knower is now placed in antithesis to the object as known, and the object is not independent of the human thinking process. Reality is man rather than the cosmos. The political state is justifiable so long as it enforces the rights of the individual; religious authority is the expression of the individual conscience; physical nature is a human interpretation.[1] Plato, Dante, and Goethe are good representatives of these three different historical periods of the human mind. How can they be understood without a philosophical appreciation of the periods in which they lived? =Table of the Subdivisions of the Three General Periods of Philosophy=