Developments that laid the groundwork for the modern psychology of attitude began with early Greek philosophy. Conceptions of the cosmologists during the Golden Age of Greek Civilization and the Sophist movement served as a link between mythology and science. Contributions of British Empiricism and German Experimentalism were instrumental to the foundation of scientific psychology in the United States. The beginning of the three-phase analysis of attitude, that of cognition (thinking), affection (feeling), and conation (acting), can be traced to the time of the early Greek philosophers. Cognition, affection, and conation serve as a tripartite classification of the subuniverses for the totality of "attitude-behaviors" in human experience. This three-phase classification, first expounded by Plato, has persisted to the present time. Modern attitude theorists use these categories to analyze and describe human action and behavior just as the ancient Greek philosophers used this system of analysis to describe and explain their conceptions of the human experience. (Author)