Berkeley's & Hume's Philosophical Memoirs

David Berman looks for similarities and differences in the aims of the two thinkers.

- David Berman

There are interesting points of both agreement and disagreement in the lives of George Berkeley (1685-1753)and David Hume (1711-1776), arguably the two greatest British philosophers. I also think we have an outstanding philosophical memoir from each, summing up their work, especially in respect of their ruling passions. Both memoirs contain the philosopher’s very last philosophical words, which can be naturally read as their final philosophical testaments. Yet for all that, I don’t think that this has been noticed by their biographers, or by those who have written on them philosophically.

All students of philosophy should know of Hume’s memoir, My Own Life, which he wrote the year he died, 1776, and which was published a year later. But what is Berkeley’s counterpart? It is the last section, §368, of his Siris, his last philosophical work, published in 1744.

As a memoir in the fuller sense, My Own Life tells us a great deal about Hume’s character. He portrays himself as cheerful and content, sociable, studious, and independent-minded, also philosophical, by which he seems to include being even-tempered or stoical as well as concerned with philosophy per se. In the course of the memoir he also shows himself to be witty and humorous. All of this comes out explicitly in his own description of his character in the final paragraph:

“I am… or rather was… a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my humour”.

It is indicative of their styles that while both memoirs are succinct, Berkeley’s is even more so. Indeed, it is short enough to quote here in full: