Shepherd at Barnbougle

This is a repost of a post from an earlier version of this site. It was originally published 16 November 2005.

An interesting passage on Lady Mary Shepherd, written by her daughter:

My mother, whilst at Barnbougle, between the ages of 17 and 27, wrote, I cannot say how many M.S. books full of metaphysical disquisitions, exposing errors in the reasoning of Hume’s atheistical treatises, and the unitarian doctrines of the then new philosopher, Priestley, who contrived to make many fancy him a Christian, and and then drew them off into unchristian principles before they knew where they were. All these manuscript metaphysical essays — or most of them, were shown to Mr. Pillans. Her books however were written some years later, and it was her husband, who discerning their importance, caused them to be published. One of them is called “An Essay on Cause and Effect;” and the other “Essays on the Existence of an External Universe,” written against Bishop Berkeley’s idealism, which had been turned by the atheists into an argument on their side. Dr, Whewell made one of Lady Mary Shepherd’s books a text book at Cambridge. I have heard both him and Sir Charles Lyell speak of my mother to other men amongst the learned, as an “unanswerable logician, in whose argument it was impossible to find loophole or flaw.”1

Shepherd would have been Lady Mary Primrose at the time. The Barnbougle in question is Barnbougle Castle. (See also here for a bit of the family history.) There is also a calotype and a nice photograph of the castle online. The current castle was expanded by the 5th Earl of Rosebery, Archibald Primrose (1847-1929; he became Prime Minister). The family had largely abandoned the castle by 1817; they found Dalmeny House, Edinburgh, more comfortable. You can pick out Lady Mary on the family tree; she’s the second daughter of the 3rd Earl. You can also see a picture of Lady Mary (scroll down and click the ‘enlarge image’ link; unfortunately, it doesn’t say which of the girls is Mary, but I think she’s the second from the right).

For a general discussion of Shepherd’s life and works, see the excellent Thoemmes Press essay on her. You can find a few selections from Shepherd’s philosophical works in the old Internal Resources section of this site.