The _periodization_ of history is subject to the same criticism. To _think_ history is certainly _to divide it into periods_, because thought is organism, dialectic, drama, and as such has its periods, its beginning, its middle, and its end, and all the other ideal pauses that a drama implies and demands. But those pauses are ideal and therefore inseparable from thought, with which they are one, as the shadow is one with the body, silence with sound: they are identical and changeable with it. Christian thinkers divided history into that which preceded and that which followed the redemption, and this periodization was not an addition to Christian thought, but Christian thought itself. We modern Europeans divide it into antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. This periodization has been subject to a great deal of refined criticism on the part of those who hold that it came to be introduced anyhow, almost dishonestly, without the authority of great names, and without the advice of the philosophers and the methodologists being asked on the matter. But it has maintained itself and will maintain itself so long as our consciousness shall persist in its present phase. The fact of its having been insensibly formed would appear to be rather a merit than a demerit, because this means that it was not due to the caprice of an individual, but has followed the development of modern consciousness itself. When antiquity has nothing more to tell us who still feel the need of studying Greek and Latin, Greek philosophy and Roman law; when the Middle Ages have been superseded (and they have not been superseded yet); when a new social form, different from that which emerged from the ruins of the Middle Ages, has supplanted our own; then the problem itself and the historical outlook which derives from it will also be changed, and perhaps antiquity and the Middle Ages and modern times will all be contained within a single epoch, and the pauses be otherwise distributed. And what has been said of these great periods is to be understood of all the others, which vary according to the variety of historical material and the various modes of viewing it. It has sometimes been said that every periodization has a 'relative' value. But we must say 'both relative and absolute,' like all thought, it being understood that the periodization is intrinsic to thought and determined by the determination of thought.