The cycle began again in modern times. As representatives of the dogmatic period in modern philosophy, DesCartes and Spinoza may be chosen. They were not, of course, naively dogmatic, for philosophy had learned much from its many disappointments, and DesCartes, especially, starts out with reflections which would seem to make him very much a skeptic. And yet each believed in the power of the mind to draw absolute truth from itself, and each proceeded in a highly rationalistic way to build up his system. The very title of Spinoza's great work indicates this attitude of mind: "_Ethica more geometrico demonstrata_." The conception of society which characterizes this period is, again, not naive, but still has a supernatural, or at least a superhuman, basis, for it is in a Law of Nature (capitalized and personified) that social institutions find their origin and justification. Critical reflections, starting with Locke, and passing through Berkeley to the absolute skepticism of Hume, bring in the second, or skeptical, period, in which the rationalistic-dogmatic certitude of Spinoza and DesCartes is banished. And going with this movement in philosophic thought comes the extreme individualism of Rousseau in politics, and Adam Smith in economics. The movement away from skepticism, beginning with Kant, puts the world, and especially society, back into organic connections again, and we have, in Hegel, especially, society to the fore, and the individual real only as a part of society. The organic conception, revived by Hegel, and vitalized by the positivistic studies which applied the Darwinian doctrine to social phenomena, has characterized the greater part of the social philosophy of the last half hundred years--of course, not without protest and highly necessary criticism.