David Hume (Treatise 3.2.4):
In order to aid the imagination in conceiving the transference of property, we take the sensible object, and actually transfer its possession to the person, on whom we would bestow the property. The supposed 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. And that this explication of the matter is just, appears hence, that men have invented a symbolical delivery, to satisfy the fancy, where the real one is impracticable. Thus the giving the keys of a granary is understood to be the delivery of the corn contained in it: The giving of stone and earth represents the delivery of a manor. This is a kind of superstitious practice in civil laws, and in the laws of nature, resembling the Roman catholic superstitions in religion. As the Roman catholics represent the inconceivable mysteries of the Christian religion, and render them more present to the mind, by a taper, or habit, or grimace, which is supposed to resemble them; so lawyers and moralists have run into like inventions for the same reason, and have endeavoured by those means to satisfy themselves concerning the transference of property by consent.
'Taper', of course, is a candle or lamp, and 'habit' is a vestment or article of clothing; but it's very easy to misread 'grimace', whose meaning has changed over time. A grimace (in the eighteenth century, the accent would have been on the second syllable, and the 'a' could, depending on dialect, have been a long 'a') originally meant an affectation or a pretense; 'fashionable grimace', for instance, would be the stylized etiquette of the fashionable classes. It could also mean, relatedly, a mask, and thus it comes down to us meaning a contorted facial expression, which is not at all what Hume means. 'Laws of nature' here also means something like the general rules of justice (which are artificial, but are natural in the sense of being inevitably constructed over time when people interact), not scientific laws. With 'mysterious', the immediate reference is to the 'inconceivable mysteries; I'm not sure if Hume is also deliberately playing on the fact that the word could also mean 'sacramental', but he might well be doing so.
Hume is being deliberately sarcastic throughout. 'Inconceivable mysteries of the Christian religion' is not a compliment but an ironic disparagement, and very carefully selected, I think, since it is something that could be said non-disparagingly. Hume is also -- as is often the case when he talks about Catholics -- saying something negative about them that might be agreed with by the dimmer sort among Hume's Scottish Presbyterian or Anglican peers, but in a way that would just as equally apply to Scottish Presbyterians and Anglicans. That Catholics engage in mummery would have had the agreement of a lot of Protestants, but Hume has stated it so broadly that it doesn't hit only Catholics. Protestants, after all, have the same 'inconceivable mysteries', and have many of the same signs of them, however simplified; changing from a doctrine of transubstantiation to a doctrine of spiritual presence or memorial doesn't make the communion service any less symbolic. As I mentioned, this all fits with Hume's common practice on this point; for instance, he generalized Protestant criticisms against Catholic miracles so that they would be a problem for the miracles Protestants accept, as well.
The notion of legal superstition is interesting, and accusing civil lawyers of being like Catholics is actually rather funny in its way, but also complicates the entire discussion. Hume assumes that 'symbolical delivery' must be false (he used the term a little before this passage) because it is symbolical. But in the relevant legal system, transferring the keys to the granary does not merely represent the transition of property; it is part of the transition of property. The symbolic act is an instrumental component of actually doing what it symbolizes. It's easy to miss that every contract is a sort of symbolical delivery. If you sign over your property to me, the signed contract is not any less symbolic than the keys handed over. But if you sign over your property to me, you did in fact transfer your property to me, and signing the written paper was part of actually doing so, not a mere representation of it. Hume seems to have the notion that the transfer of property is independent of the symbolic acts, with the symbolic act merely resembling the transfer; but the symbolic act instrumentally effects the transfer, as well.
In any case, while Hume takes all this to have a negative valence, I think Hume has actually stumbled on a profoundly important set of points, whose full significance he misses by jumping immediately to ironic remarks about superstition. The civil legal system is indeed somewhat to man as the sacramental system is to God; the former reflects the mysteries of man in somewhat like the way the latter reflects the mysteries of God; through the former, man is a small creator and little savior, after his own small fashion dispensing gifts to transform human life; the law is thus far an analogue of grace. More immediately, this sort of symbolic invention is a universal part of life, found in quite robust forms in religion and in law, but generalizing out from there to all sorts of things, like ordinary communication and etiquette, that work in something like the same way. If we wish to call it 'superstition', as Hume does in his joke on civil lawyers, we are committed to much of human life being not merely superstitious but unavoidably so.
