Three words, two and a half thousand years of argument. Plato tied them together: in the Philebus, when the good cannot be caught with a single idea, Socrates hunts it with three - beauty, proportion and truth. Yet the tidy triad we quote today is younger than it looks. Medieval thinkers listed the One, the True and the Good; beauty’s place on that list was disputed. The formula took shape in the eighteenth century, when Shaftesbury argued that what is beautiful is harmonious, what is harmonious is true, and what is both is good. Victor Cousin made it famous in 1853; in our time Ken Wilber made it popular again as his “Big Three”. It endures because it refuses to split them: a life should be honest, kind and well made.