Biographical Directory 297Gregory, John (1724 –1773). Physician and writer. He was born in Ab-
erdeen, Scotland, to a physician and professor of medicine, James
Gregory (1674 –1733). Eventually John Gregory himself became a doc-
tor and professor. After studying in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Leiden,
where he met John Wilkes and Charles Townshend, Gregory took his
fi rst post giving lectures in medicine and in natural and moral philoso-
phy at King’s College, Aberdeen. Gregory’s ideas about human nature
and morality became infl uential among Scottish intellectuals. He be-
lieved that human nature was fi xed and discoverable through scientifi c
investigation. Furthermore, of the two principles of the human mind,
reason and instinct, he believed reason to be the weaker and therefore
subordinate principle. In 1766, Gregory was elected to a prestigious post
as professor of the practice of physic at Edinburgh University. Of par-
ticular interest to Wollstonecraft was his pamphlet A Father’s Legacy to
His Daughters (1774). In this manual Gregory advises his daughters to
cover over their rational pursuits and instead foster a set of female man-
ners, among which delicacy, sensibility, and modesty are paramount.
Wollstonecraft was highly critical of Gregory’s encouraging artifi ce and
dissimulation in place of authentic religious and moral formation.
Hervey, James (1714 –1758). Anglican clergyman and devotional writer.
His Meditations and Contemplations (1746 –1747) were especially
popular with signifi cant infl uence in the Evangelical Revival. Hervey
was the object of both extensive praise and criticism as a result of his
ecstatic style of writing, which sought to combine Puritan meditation
with the approach taken in The Spectator and in Shaftesbury’s Moral-
ists. Wollstonecraft uses his writings as an example of moral writings
that appeal to the passions rather than to cool reason. She admits such
sentimental literature is popular, but suggests that it offends good sense
and taste.
Hume, David (1711–1776). Arguably the most important Anglophone phi-
losopher and an especially important member of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment and moral sense tradition. Although his most famous and widely
read work is his philosophical Treatise on Human Nature (1739 –1740),
Hume himself believed it was inferior to his Enquiry Concerning the
Principles of Morals (1751). In his lifetime Hume was relatively un-
known apart from those who denounced him as a skeptic and an atheist.
He famously lamented that his treatise “fell dead from the press,” and he
suffered the further disappointment of never attaining a much- coveted
post as Chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy at Edinburgh.