"Hume noticed clearly the connection of these doctrines to freedom, and how the maximum freedom of all requires equal restraints on the freedom of each through what he called the three 'fundamental laws of nature': 'the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises' (1739/1886:11, 288, 293). [...] Hume may have been the first clearly to perceive that general freedom becomes possible by the natural moral instincts being `checked and restrained by a subsequent judgement' according to 'justice, or a regard to the property of others, fidelity, or the observance of promises [which have] become obligatory, and acquire[d] an authority over mankind' (1741, 1742/1886:111, 455). Hume did not make the error, later so common, of confusing two senses of freedom: that curious sense in which an isolated individual is supposed to be able to be free, and that in which many persons collaborating with one another can be free. Seen in the latter context of such collaboration, only abstract rules of property - i.e., the rules of law - guarantee freedom."