Property And Riches

The relation of property most commonly produces pride and is the closest to it.

Ownership is a relation between a person and an object which permits him its free use and possession [that excludes others].

Ownership is the cause of:

• the freedom that the owner has
• the advantages he reaps from the owned thing

This is true whether justice is seen as a natural or an artificial virtue.

If justice were artificial, then honour, custom, and civil laws serve as the natural conscience and make ownership produce the same effects.

The word “property” naturally carries our thought to the proprietor.

• From the proprietor our thought goes to the property.
• This shows a perfect relation of ideas.

A relation of ideas, joined to that of impressions, always produces a transition of affections.

If the foregoing system is solid and satisfactory,

Whenever a thing we own gives us any pleasure or pain, pride or humility must arise from this conjunction of relations.

A vain man owns the best things.

• His houses, equipage, furniture, clothes, horses, hounds, excel all others in his conceit.
• He gets pride and vanity from the smallest advantage in any of these.

Ownership of useful, beautiful, surprising things creates vanity.

• These give pleasure and nothing else.

Every new instance is a new argument.

• The instances are here innumerable.
• No other system has ever been so fully proved by experience as my system.

Hume on Money and Riches

The ownership of anything that gives pleasure also produces also pride by a double relation of impressions and ideas.

This is why the power of acquiring ownership has the same effect.

Riches are the power of acquiring the property of what pleases.

• They influence the passions only because of this power.

Paper is considered as riches because it conveys the power of acquiring money.

Money is not riches.

It is a metal endowed with qualities of solidity, weight and fusibility.

It is only riches as long as it has a relation to the life’s pleasures and conveniences.

We may draw from this, one of my strongest arguments to prove the influence of the double relations on pride and humility.

People make a frivolous distinction between:

• a power and
• the use of that power

Any ability only exists if it is exerted and put in action.

Many things operate on our passions through the idea and supposition of power, independent of its actual exercise.

We are pleased when we get an ability to procure pleasure.

We are displeased when another gets a power of giving pain.