[A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume]@TWC D-Link bookA Treatise of Human Nature PART III OF THE WILL AND DIRECT PASSIONS 5/82
Government makes a distinction of property, and establishes the different ranks of men.
This produces industry, traffic, manufactures, law-suits, war, leagues, alliances, voyages, travels, cities, fleets, ports, and all those other actions and objects, which cause such a diversity, and at the same time maintain such an uniformity in human life. Should a traveller, returning from a far country, tell us, that he had seen a climate in the fiftieth degree of northern latitude, where all the fruits ripen and come to perfection in the winter, and decay in the summer, after the same manner as in England they are produced and decay in the contrary seasons, he would find few so credulous as to believe him.
I am apt to think a travellar would meet with as little credit, who should inform us of people exactly of the same character with those in Plato's republic on the one hand, or those in Hobbes's Leviathan on the other.
There is a general course of nature in human actions, as well as in the operations of the sun and the climate.
There are also characters peculiar to different nations and particular persons, as well as common to mankind.
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