The German word which the above-mentioned phrases attempt to render is “_Sittlichkeit_” The word takes its meaning from “_Sitte_” which in common usage is equivalent to “custom.” Hegel’s use of the term, in his later writings, as opposed to “_Moralität_” and as indicating, in comparison with it, a fuller and truer phase of life, is an intentional declaration of war against the Kantian principle of the pure good will, and is the gist of Hegel’s ethico-political view in a nutshell. The word would most naturally apply to the life of a community in which law, custom, and sentiment were not yet very sharply distinguished. According to accepted views, the communities of ancient Greece, before they were stirred by the reflective movement which is associated with the names of Socrates and the Sophists, would be examples of a disposition and order of life which the word “_Sittlichkeit_” might denote. And it was in the Greek communities, as is shown by the work which he sketched as early as 1802, [1] that Hegel found this suggestion of a whole in which law and custom, duty and disposition, were absolutely at one. He subsequently modified the conception in accordance with the modern idea of freedom, by allowing a greater emphasis and relief to its {266} component parts, and insisting (against Plato’s _Republic_ for instance,) on the principle of individual choice, initiative, and property, as necessary to the complete communion of intelligent beings. As we have just seen, indeed, he introduces reflective morality or conscientiousness into the sphere of Right, to represent the full nature of mind, which is only exhibited in a consciousness which pursues its aims of its own choice and for their own sake. [1] The _System d. Sittlichkeit_. The _Rechtsphil_. was not published till 1817, in its earliest form. See Wallace, _Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind_, p. 187. The Ethical System, then, or Social Ethics, is put forward as the ideal fact which includes, and does the work of both the literal law and the moral will, alike in practice and as a theory. It is the idea of freedom developed (i.) into a present world, and (ii.) into the nature of self-consciousness.