  The history of philosophy reveals a rich source of conceptions of  analysis. Their origin may lie in ancient Greek geometry, and to this extent the history of analytic methodologies might be seen as a  series of footnotes to Euclid. But analysis developed in different  though related ways in the two traditions stemming from Plato and  Aristotle, the former based on the search for definitions and the  latter on the idea of regression to first causes. The two poles  represented in these traditions defined methodological space until  well into the early modern period, and in some sense is still  reflected today. The creation of analytic geometry in the seventeenth century introduced a more reductive form of analysis, and an  analogous and even more powerful form was introduced around the turn  of the twentieth century in the logical work of Frege and Russell.  Although conceptual analysis, construed decompositionally from the  time of Leibniz and Kant, and mediated by the work of Moore, is often viewed as characteristic of analytic philosophy, logical analysis,  taken as involving translation into a logical system, is what  inaugurated the analytic tradition. Analysis has also frequently been seen as reductive, but connective forms of analysis are no less  important. Connective analysis, historically inflected, would seem to be particularly appropriate, for example, in understanding analysis  itself.