iated without
government. 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. The knowledge of these characters is founded on the
observation of an uniformity in the actions, that flow from them; and
this uniformity forms the very essence of necessity.

I can imagine only one way of eluding this argument, which is by denying
that uniformity of human actions, on which it is founded. As long as
actions have a constant union and connexion with the situation and
temper of the agent, however we may in words refuse to acknowledge the
necessity, we really allow the thing. Now some may, perhaps, find a
pretext to deny this regular union and connexion. For what is more
capricious than human actions? What more inconstant than the desires of
man? And what creature departs more widely, not only from right reason,
but from his own character and disposition? An hour, a moment is
sufficient to make him change from one extreme to another, and overturn
what cost the greatest pain and labour to establish. Necessity is
regular and certain. Human conduct is irregular and uncertain. The one,
therefore, proceeds not from the other.

To this I reply, that in judging of the actions of men we must proceed
upon the same maxims, as when we reason concerning external objects.
When any phaenomena are constantly and invariably conjoined together,
they acquire such a connex