A. Elley Finch's On the Inductive Philosophy, Including a Parallel between Lord Bacon and A. Comte as Philosophers: A Discourse Delivered Before the Sunday Lecture Society, Nov. 26,1871(1872) provides us with a glimpse of the methodological world of the earlier conversation. The lecture shows the coherence of the conversation, as well as its optimism. The natural sciences represented more than a model for social science: they were also coparticipants in the struggle between theism and science. Much of the distinctive flavor of methodological writing in this period is given by the omnipresence of this struggle, which took the form of the epistemological question of the relations between "the several methods which the mind has pursued in its search after truth," methods which Finch, following Comte, called "the Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Scientific" (Finch, 1872, p. 2). Finch mentioned James Herschel, William Whewell, and a good many other physicists and writers on the history of astronomy, physics, and electromagnetism, and ran their views together with those of Comte and Bacon — a useful reminder that the writers were part of the same movement of thought as Comte, Mill, and Quetelet and that what this movement of thought represented was problematic — even odious — to conventional public opinion.¹ The movement of thought was a community of discourse as well. They discussed one another's views on astronomical and physical subjects. They shared roughly the same ideas of which sorts of social science had been successful. Finch's examples are representative: political economy, the "psychology" of Locke and James Mill, and the emerging statistical literature, including the commentaries on the Census and such descriptive works as Mayhew's London Labour and London Poor, correspond to a collection of communities of discourse which also overlap. The despair over the possibility of the social sciences, which is part of the backdrop to the methodological writings of Weber and Durkheim, had not yet set in. Finch pointed only to successes. He noted that Malthus's "arguments were pronounced by Archbishop Whately to be as unanswerable as the Elements of Euclid" (1872, p. 33), and treated them as "an almost perfect instance of the Inductive Method." The method of statistics, described as "the grand inductive weapon of sanitary science" (1872, p. 32), was enlisted in the struggle with religion. "The theological theory of disease," Finch said, is "becoming gradually stamped out by statistics' (1872, p. 32). The sense that all these enterprises shared a common front against theology was reciprocated: Conte's Cours and Mill's Principles of Political Economy were placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum by the Catholic Church.