 Things aren’t any easier for philosophy written in English or German, both of which do have a linguistic means of distinguishing the two concepts. The English term “consciousness” first became widely used in the seventeenth century to mark out this new concept; the German term “Bewusstsein” was coined in the early eighteenth century (the German word for conscience is “Gewissen”). But even with a new word to identify the concept, the English and German terms had multiple shades of meaning. By 1727, we find an English text defining consciousness as: