In analysing the Ethical System, we shall say nothing of “duties” or “virtues.” Duty is in each case what the relation requires--the attachment of the universal system of will to the individual life. Virtue is a habit of such action, considered as embodied in the nature of an individual. The idea of virtue and virtuousness is not, in Hegel’s view, altogether suitable to the members of an ethical commonwealth. It belongs rather to a time of undeveloped social life, when ethical principles and the realisation of them are ascribed to the nature of peculiarly gifted individuals. Virtue or excellence, to the Greek moralist, for instance, suggested doing something better than the average, or being in some way specially gifted, and it is still apt to indicate the desire to be some thing exceptional, and not simply to find yourself in genuine service. The meaning of the words to-day tends to narrow itself to certain special relations, and does not indicate that life of the member in the whole, which is the essence of what we really value. The Ethical System, or the Order of Social Ethics, then--the mind and conduct of the citizen in Christendom--may be regarded as affirming freedom {269} in three principal aspects, necessarily connected, and supplementing one another. Outwardly these aspects are different groups of facts--different institutions; inwardly they are different moods or dispositions of the one and indivisible human mind. Thus, Hegel’s analysis regards the social whole or system of social ethics from three points of view. First, in respect of the Family; secondly, in respect of what he has entitled Bourgeois Society; and thirdly, in respect of the Political Organism, or the State in the strict sense. It is to be borne in mind that, like the three principal divisions in the sphere of Right, these headings represent explicit theories of society, as well as groups of facts. 6. Beginning once more, within an ordered social sphere, at the ethical factor which stands nearest to the natural world, and has taken, so to speak, the minimum step into the realm of purpose and consciousness, we start from the family. As the family exists in a modern civilised community, it is something necessary to society and the State, but absolutely distinct from both.