西周時期,周人明確了德的概念。其後,重要的問題是思考德由何而來、如何獲取德,即如何修德。周人創造性地提出"帥型祖考之德"的觀念,將距離遙遠的天降之德轉向"近取諸譬"的祖考之德,為社會中人們的修德開辟了可由之徑。儒家"內得于己"的修身路徑,實由此啟端。西周宗法社會,天子祖述文武之德,貴族善繼祖考之德,似乎各家有各家之德。但是,祖考之德在實際中與臣德相合,因此天子之德與祖考之德固非一宗一姓之私德,而是由家族倫理擴展為政治倫理,君君臣臣之價值觀念由此而確立。

The Concept of de became explicit in the Western Zhou.Thereafter,questions about where de came from and how it could be obtained and cultivated became important.The idea of"following and modeling oneself upon the ancestral de"(帥型祖考之德) transformed defrom something remote that fell from heaven into an ancestral dethat was near at hand,thus opening a route for self-cultivation.This was the beginning of Confucian self-cultivation or"cultivating deinternally"(內得于己).In the patriarchal society of the Western Zhou,the concept of de seems to have taken different forms;the rulers followed the de of King Wen and King Wu,and aristocrats carried forward the de of their ancestors.In fact,however,the de of the ancestors was in practice combined with the morality of officials.Thus the de of the rulers and the de of the ancestors did not refer to the private de of a particular clan or family;the term indicates a development from clan ethics into political ethics,marking the establishment of the value concept that the ruler should behave as a ruler and the subject as a subject.