For (i.), in the first place, the ethical system, or the ways of acting which make up social ethics, constitute a present and actual world. So far it partakes of the nature of the literal law and order, the system of property-holding, which, as we have seen, is all but a natural fact. Social Ethic, we might say, _is_ a physical fact. The bodily habits and external actions of a people incorporate it. It transforms the face of a country, “domesticating the untamed earth.” [1] Each individual has his own bodily existence in a determinate mode as a part of the ethical life of society. The rules and traditions of ethical living are, as has been said, “the nature of things.” They are as hard, as “objective” an order as “sun, moon, mountains, rivers, and all objects of nature.” [2] Man lives according to them before he knows that he {267} does so, and always, in a great degree, independently of knowing that he does so. As this group of facts, or considered from this point of view, the ethical system is the body of the moral world. [1] Aeschylus, _Eumenides_, I. 14. [2] _Rechtsphil_., sect. 146. (ii.) But it is also and no less the very nature of self-consciousness. It is as much a demand of man’s intelligence or an inner and universal law as the “pure will” itself. [1] The difference between them is that the Ethical System is a _system_, a world, though from the point of view of will regarded as inner, that is to say, as something which is the motive and fulfills the demand of consciousness. Thus, it bears the character of a thoroughly systematised theory, as contrasted with the idea of a good will, which is a mere general point of view. And it is because of this systematic character that it is enabled to connect the individual or particular will with the universal spirit of the community. It is only in a system that a particular fact can be connected with a universal law, as the planetary motions are with the law of gravitation. The particular will, as we have explained above, is universalised by its relation to a systematic purpose which it partly implies and partly realises. A man wishes for this thing or that thing, but not at any price. The reservations to which his wish is subject, by reason of other purposes and postulates of life, are known to him only in part; but if they could be stated in full, they would constitute the system of his life as realised in the universal life of the community. It is precisely {268} analogous to the process which a common judgment of perception has to go through in becoming a scientific truth--the implications have to be stated in full, and the perception modified in accordance with them. And when this is done, we have no longer a fact, but a science. [1] On all this portion of the subject, see Mr. Bradley’s Essay, “My Station and its Duties,” in _Ethical Studies_. Regarded from this point of view, as the substance of the individual Will, the Ethical System is the Soul of the moral world.