Lady Mary Shepherd
Her older brother Archibald Primrose, had a successful life and eventually became a Member of Parliament and 4th Earl of Rosebery.
The Primrose family had large economic and social standing, this status allowed Mary to study under a private tutor named Mr. Pillans.
“I can truly say that from a very early age, I have examined my thought, as to its manner of reasoning in numbers; and from time to time have applied such notices to other reasonings, either for amusement or improvement; — indeed chiefly in order to chastise the vague, illusory, illogical method of reasoning admitted with every part of discourse, whether gay, or serious, & into each department of literature however important its object.” -Lady Mary Shepherd Not only did the children of the Primrose family have access to large sums of money and other obvious luxuries of wealth, but more importantly they had access to an extremely large personal library.
After a time he took hold of her chin and, while turning her head, said in a kind of melting voice, ‘Child, thee needn’t keep at books whilst we’re traveling — does your mother put such strict orders on you?” (Brandreth 1886, p. 33).
In the first, an essay on the relation between cause and effect, she criticized the views of David Hume, Thomas Brown and the physiologist William Lawrence.
In her second book of essays, on the perception of an external universe, she argued against both the idealism of George Berkeley and Thomas Reid's epistemological reliance on natural instinct.
Mary Shepherd passed away at the age of 69 in 1847 in Hyde Park in London, but not before leaving an everlasting legacy in the world of philosophy.
Charles Lyell and William Whewell recognized and described Shepherd as an ‘unanswerable logician, in whose argument it was impossible to find loophole or flaw’ according to her daughter, Mary Elizabeth.
Shepherd maintained connections throughout the philosophical and academic world at large with other influential people at the time such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Somerville, Sydney Smith, and Thomas Malthus.
She influenced her friends like Charles Babbage with mathematics, David Ricardo with economics, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his poetry.
With Sall Atticum corn’d With Paper-spice-pepper’d With Book-garnish adorn’d Enter Lady Mary Shepheard Imbued with a taste for Prose, poesy, paste Metaphysics to lull her Polemics But what’s that to you?
Mary Shepherd describes how her inclination and passion for philosophical thinking is derived from her academic and intellectual upbringing in a letter she wrote to Charles Babbage stating, “I can truly say that from a very early age, I have examined my thought, as to its manner of reasoning in numbers; and from time to time have applied such notices to other reasonings, either for amusement or improvement; — indeed chiefly in order to chastise the vague, illusory, illogical method of reasoning admitted with every part of discourse, whether gay, or serious, & into each department of literature however important its object,” (Project Vox Team, 2021).
“…the mind strives, if possible, to find the very essences of things from the bare comparison of the relations of its ideas: for, although we be philosophers enough to know it is impossible to do so, we are for ever endeavoring to catch at, and yet for ever disappointed at not meeting with, those essences.” —Lady Mary Shepherd, in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (1832, 708).
