Mary Shepherd and the meaning of ‘life’

ABSTRACT

In the final chapters of her 1824 Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect, Lady Mary Shepherd considers what it means for an organism to be alive. The physician William Lawrence (1783–1867) had recently presented a theory of life that historian Stephen Jacyna has labelled ‘immanentist’. Shepherd’s critique of Lawrence’s arguments reveals a specific application of her own anti-Humean causal theory and shows her own affinities with the ‘transcendentalist’ camp. This paper explores Shepherd’s criticisms of Lawrence, offering some suggestions for understanding Shepherd’s own account of life as a principle, power, or cause, that, when ‘mixed’ with a certain kind of organized body, makes that body living.

KEYWORDS:

• Shepherd
• Hume
• Lawrence
• life
• causation

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at San Francisco State University in May 2019. I am grateful to the members of the audience for their helpful questions, as well as to two anonymous referees for this journal who offered useful suggestions for improving the paper.

Notes

1 We could call these theories forms of ‘vitalism’, but Shepherd herself never uses that term. Her contemporaries referred to “vital powers” (Lawrence, Lectures, 78), “vital phenomena” (Barclay, Inquiry, 21), and “vital principles” (Abernethy, Inquiry, 89), but not ‘vitalism’. Moreover, ‘vitalism’ is used in so many ways that using it here would invite confusion. On the complexity of nineteenth-century theories of life, see Benton, “Vitalism”.

2 Immanentism can also be characterized as a form of ‘endogenous vitalism’, and transcendentalism as ‘exogenous vitalism’ (see Jacyna, “Immanence or Transcendence”, 313). Shepherd echoes this language when she refers to an “extraneous power” (Shepherd, Essay, 180 and 182).

3 In this account of the dispute between Abernethy and Lawrence, I am indebted to Temkin, “Basic Science”.

4 Shepherd gives page numbers from the 1819 edition of Lawrence’s book (the first edition). However, all citations in this paper are from the third edition (1823).

5 ‘Irritability’ and ‘sensibility’ had been key concepts in physiology since the work of Francis Glisson in the seventeenth century and Albrecht von Haller in the eighteenth; see Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaption, 65.

6 Shepherd paraphrases Lawrence. The exact quotation is this: “Living bodies exhibit a constant internal motion, in which we observe an uninterrupted admission and assimilation of new, and a correspondent separation and expulsion of old particles. The form remains the same, the component particles are continually changing. While this motion lasts, the body is said to be alive; when it has irrecoverably ceased, to be dead. The organic structure then yields to the chemical affinities of the surrounding agents, and is speedily destroyed” (Lawrence, Lectures, 81).

7 Shepherd herself suggests in her discussion of Lawrence that the word ‘gold’ can be understood in two ways. It can be “a name for certain enumerated qualities, en masse”, such as ductility, being yellow, etc.; in this case we have arbitrarily assigned the name to the effects that arise together when we perceive a certain kind of object (Shepherd, Essay, 155). But it can also be used to refer to the cause of those effects, the external object that necessarily produces certain perceived qualities when it interacts with our senses (Shepherd, Essay, 155). Using the terminology I have introduced, the former is gold_e; the latter, gold_c. While Shepherd does not use this terminology, I think it captures her distinctions.

8 L. S. Jacyna also notes that the English physician Thomas Charles Morgan (1783–1843) held that “a strong similarity existed between vital properties and such phenomena found in inanimate nature as chemical affinity and gravitational attraction” (Jacyna, “Immanence or Transcendence”, 314).

9 Shepherd says almost nothing about what might cause muscles to be irritable, but in several passages she makes a tripartite distinction, referring to “sensation, life, or action” (Shepherd, Essays, 394–5). Evidently she thought muscular motion (action) is due to yet another distinct causal factor.

10 She uses the term ‘soul’, but this is for her equivalent to mind. See Shepherd, Essays, 310 and Shepherd, Essay, 171. For further discussion of Shepherd’s account of soul/mind, see Boyle, “Mary Shepherd”.