1001Philosophers

David Hume vs George Berkeley

Hume and Berkeley are usually grouped together as the British empiricists who pushed Locke's principles to radical conclusions, but their conclusions are very different.

At a glance

David HumeGeorge Berkeley
Dates1711 – 17761685 – 1753
NationalityScottishIrish
EraModernModern
Movements Empiricism, Scottish Enlightenment Empiricism
Profile David Hume → George Berkeley →

Where they agree

Both held that all ideas derive from experience, both rejected the Lockean concept of material substance underlying our perceptions, and both took the analysis of perceptual content as the central problem of metaphysics. Hume read Berkeley carefully and was shaped by him.

Where they disagree

Berkeley's response to Locke is to deny material substance and hold that to be is to be perceived: only minds and ideas exist, and material objects are reducible to bundles of perceptions sustained in the mind of God. Hume's response is to deny the substantial self as well: there are only impressions and ideas, with no underlying mind to bear them. Berkeley reaches an idealist immaterialism that preserves God; Hume reaches a skepticism that does not.

Representative quotes

David Hume

  • “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

    Part 3, Section 3

  • “Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.”

    Variant (perhaps a paraphrase of this passage): It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

  • “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

    Section X: Of Miracles; Part I. 87

George Berkeley

  • “To be is to be perceived.”

    A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, §3

  • “Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.”

    Paragraph 368

  • “Few men think, yet all will have opinions.”

    Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition, (1734)

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