Mary Shepherd on Space and Minds

Abstract In her last known work, ‘Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics’ (1832), Mary Shepherd writes that ‘mind, may inhere in definite portions of matter . . . or of infinite space’. Shepherd thus suggests that a mind—a ‘capacity for sensation in general’—may have a spatial location. This is prima facie surprising given that she is committed to the view that the mind is unextended. This essay argues that Shepherd can consistently honor both of these commitments. First, even though finite minds due to their unextendedness cannot occupy space as material bodies do, such minds can nonetheless be said to have a spatial location in virtue of their ‘presence’, or what Shepherd calls ‘inherence’, in a material body. Second, in a similar way, the divine mind is present throughout the whole of space and is thus omnipresent. In contrast to finite minds, the divine mind does not require a body to be present in space. Rather, God’s omnipresence is best understood in a ‘holenmerist’ sense, where the divine mind is wholly present in every part of creation.