1. The stability of property, taken by itself, is very inconvenient, despite its usefulness. Applications of the rules for the distribution of possessions, given in the last section (present possession, occupation, prescription, accession and succession, “depend very much on chance.” They are not likely to lead to an arrangement that would satisfy people’s needs and fulfill their desires. There has to be a remedy for this, but it cannot be that everyone can seize what he wants or desires, as this would undermine the stability of property which is needed for society to exist. Therefore, “the rules of justice seek some medium betwixt a rigid stability, and this changeable and uncertain adjustment.” The medium is that property must be stable unless the owner agrees to give them to someone else. Since the owner gives consent, and only his interests could be harmed by the transaction, the transfer of property “can have no ill consequence, in occasioning wars and dissentions. On the contrary, ”it may serve to many good purposes. Different parts of the earth are suitable for the production of different kinds of goods, and different people enjoy different things. Moreover, they enjoy things more when they are varied. “All this requires a mutual exchange and commerce; for which reason the translation by consent is founded on a law of nature, as well as its stability without such consent.” That is, transfer of property by consent is the second of the “laws of nature” required to meet the needs of society, the first being that of the stability of property.

2. These general considerations of interests and utility do not explain the need for the delivery of a symbolic object to seal the transfer as well as “more trivial reasons.” We do not really have an idea of property as such (“without any reference to morality, or the sentiments of the mind”). So we can have no real idea of its stability or transfer either. Stability does not cause a problem in this regard, since “it engages less our attention, and is easily past over by the mind, without any scrupulous examination.” Transfer “is a more remarkable event,” and it brings to light the defect in the idea of property. We need an aid to the imagination, an object which is actually transferred, such as the keys to a granary, which is understood as the delivery of the wheat it contains. “The suppos’d resemblance of the actions, and the presence of this sensible delivery, deceive the mind, and make it fancy, that it conceives the mysterious transition of the property.” It is really something superstitious, like the representations made by Roman Catholic rituals that are supposed to “represent the inconceivable mysteries of the Christian religion.” Lawyers and moralists resort to the same means in using symbols to convey the transfer of property that does not literally change hands.

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