Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/41

23 vast majority of cases the subject admits that he is born under obligations of allegiance to a certain sovereign, just as he admits a filial duty to his parents. From the very nature of the case, government cannot rest on the voluntary choice of isolated individuals. "Did one generation of men go off the stage at once, and another succeed, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies, the new race, if they had sense enough to choose their government, which surely is never the case with men, might voluntarily, and by general consent, establish their own form of civil polity, without any regard to the laws or precedents, which prevailed among their ancestors. But as human society is in perpetual flux, one man every hour going out of the world, another coming into it, it is necessary, in order to preserve stability in government, that the new brood should conform themselves to the established constitution, and nearly follow the path which their fathers, treading in the footsteps of theirs, had marked out for them." Human society is thus necessarily stable, just because each generation is the heir to the institutions and customs already established by its predecessors.

This passage suggests a view which we are now accustomed to see emphasized in social theories: the transmission of customs and institutions by 'social heredity,' and the importance of 'psychic environment.' Hume develops the point somewhat further in his discussion of 'national character,' by which he means the prevalence of some trait or habit among the people of a nation. National character, he says, has been assigned to two sorts of causes: moral causes, which act on the mind as motives or reasons, such as the nature of government, the course of public affairs, the economic condition of the people, communication with neighboring peoples, and similar circumstances; and physical causes, such as climate, atmosphere, and food. Hume's conclusion is that, "if we run over the globe, or revolve the annals of history, we shall discover every where signs of a sympathy or contagion of manners, none of the influence of air or climate." Men are naturally imitative, and it is accordingly impossible for a set of men to be