The dilemma seems obvious: As justice evidently tends to promote
public utility and to support civil society, the sentiment of
justice is either derived from our reflecting on that tendency,
or like hunger, thirst, and other appetites, resentment, love of
life, attachment to offspring, and other passions, arises from a
simple original instinct in the human breast, which nature has
implanted for like salutary purposes. If the latter be the case,
it follows, that property, which is the object of justice, is
also distinguished by a simple original instinct, and is not
ascertained by any argument or reflection. But who is there that
ever heard of such an instinct? Or is this a subject in which new
discoveries can be made? We may as well expect to discover, in
the body, new senses, which had before escaped the observation of
all mankind.

But farther, though it seems a very simple proposition to say,
that nature, by an instinctive sentiment, distinguishes property,
yet in reality we shall find, that there are required for that
purpose ten thousand different instincts, and these employed
about objects of the greatest intricacy and nicest discernment.
For when a definition of PROPERTY is required, that relation is
found to resolve itself into any possession acquired by
occupation, by industry, by prescription, by inheritance, by
contract, &c. Can we think that nature, by an original instinct,
instructs us in all these methods of acquisition?

These words too, inheritance and contract, stand for ideas
infinitely complicated; and to define them exactly, a hundred
volumes of laws, and a thousand volumes of commentators, have not