HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.
The General Character and the Main Divisions of Modern Philosophy. Modern Philosophy, as distinguished from Medieval Philosophy, is occupied with the immanent and concrete, rather than the transcendent and abstract; with the natural and the human, rather than the supernatural and the superhuman. As distinguished from Ancient Philosophy, it is occupied with the subject, rather than with the object; with thought, rather than with being. It may be quite easily divided into three great periods, as follows: 1. A period predominantly of reception and appropriation (though with considerable self-assertion as against mediævalism); 2. A period of original effort very largely destructive or negative (towards previous philosophy as well as the object of thought generally); 3. A period of equal originality, and more constructive or synthetic effort. Psychologically speaking, these periods may be viewed as, respectively, periods of (receptive) sense, (analytic) understanding, and (synthetic) reason; logically, as periods of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The first period extends from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth; the second, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the third quarter of the eighteenth; and the third from the third quarter of the eighteenth century, onwards.