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Some aspects of social sciences can be made more predictive and, in this sense, more like natural sciences. Electoral studies have many variables with a natural zero (ratio variables), which makes them amenable to certain types of logical model building and sets them apart from other social sciences. Still, plenty of ratio variables occur in other social sciences too, and here electoral studies may offer valuable methodological tips. From temperature to political involvement, looser scales sometimes have a way to turn into ratio scales, if we dare to play with them.

This chapter focuses on the life of Clarence King. Among the first generation of academically trained scientists in America, King had many options. He could follow the path of many of his classmates and continue graduate study abroad, he could begin a career as a scientific writer, or he could take his place as a professor of science at virtually any school in the country. Although his training emphasized traditional outlets and institutions, King chose a different course. He went into the natural world; not as a retreat from society, but as a means of political engagement.

This chapter continues the discussion of the life of Rachel Carson. Human interaction with the nonhuman world was at the foundation of Carson's environmental vision. Her childhood nature writing, for example, focused on her ordinary surroundings. During her collegiate training, her scientific knowledge of nature increased, but analysis predicated on personal experience, on the beach and in the tide pools, was still most rewarding. Carson expected natural scientists to reveal the social uses of American biology. Her critics, however, labeled her a “generalist” and a “popularizer” and relegated her vision of natural science to the domain of the amateur.

This chapter continues the discussion of the life of Clarence King. King's search for natural truths bore the imprint of John Ruskin, but his obsession with masculine science and adventure as a means of social integration and improvement originated with John Tyndall. He embraced nature as a microcosm of American society. As one of the many geologists who moved through the physical world, he was supposed to uncover mineral resources. Yet he saw his science as one way to impose a grid of order on contemporary America.

This chapter focuses on the life of Rachel Carson. In late summer of 1929, 22-year-old Rachel Carson arrived at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A recent graduate of the Pennsylvania College for Women, Carson came to the MBL as a “beginning investigator”, to study reptilian nerve systems. By the time Carson left Woods Hole, biology and its social implications were well known. When Carson established herself as natural scientist, her role as a scientist defined her social position. Her scientific credibility was (and often still is) debated, an issue greatly affected by the contemporary politics of gender, but her acceptance of the social responsibility of the scientist was not. Promoting a socially engaged understanding of natural science was something she had anticipated and prepared for much of her life.

This chapter examines the calls made by Eduard Hanslick and Guido Adler to transform the study of music after the model of the natural sciences in light of statements on science and historical study published by Wilhelm Windelband, Moriz Thausing, and other 19th-century theorists of method. It argues that polemics such as Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful inspired and reflected considerable confusion and disagreement among critics and scholars with respect to methodologies and ideologies of music research. It examines Adler's use of the term Musikwissenschaft or the “science of music,” arguing that he intended it to connote not the literal emulation of research methods associated with the natural sciences but the application of a mode of investigation that valorized empirical observation and inductive reasoning. It concludes by suggesting that many late-century writers on music, including Hanslick, Schenker, and Adler himself, harbored ambivalent attitudes toward such scientifically inspired approaches and methods.

The reputation of Oxford science deteriorated sharply in the half-century following the Commissions of the 1870s. The Devonshire Commission had bestowed qualified praise on both Oxford and Cambridge for their efforts to promote the natural sciences. But the Asquith Commission was to contrast the distinction of Cambridge University in science education and basic research with a catalogue of Oxford University's defects. After the high hopes raised by the opening of the University Museum and the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford science failed to keep pace with developments at Cambridge. Schoolmasters had long advised their pupils to go to Cambridge for mathematics, but the tradition ‘Cambridge for Science, Oxford for Arts’ — which retained its hold in the public and grammar schools long after the 20th-century revival of the science departments at Oxford — had its origin in the late Victorian era. From a national perspective it could, of course, be argued that netther university responded adequately to the growing industrial need for scientists.

This chapter continues the discussion of the life of Robert Marshall. In the first two decades of the century, many Jews, native and foreign-born, shared in the growth opportunities available in America. In the 1920s, these same Jews witnessed a “closing of the gates” as prejudice reached new levels. Robert Marshall felt much of this increasing hostility. He possessed the resources, intelligence, and training required to enter mainstream American society, but in a culture of separation, opportunity did not always equate to easy access. Marshall was at once a forester, a politician, and an agent of modern American science. For him, nature became an arena of activity as he turned to the physical world to situate himself within American society and to support his vision for a progressive America.

This chapter focuses on the radical empiricism of Walden, Thoreau’s journals, and his later scientific writings. As an artist, philosopher, surveyor, fisherman, and naturalist, Thoreau comes to accept the uncertainty of chance and its imperatives for the conduct of life, even as—like John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, and William James—he engages in the probabilistic management of nature. Thoreau learns over the course of his career that natural science is not strictly a positivist enterprise but, rather, a probabilistic pursuit in which to measure under conditions of chance is not precisely to know. Thoreau’s disciplined commitments to the handling of chance distance him from the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and help him bridge the worrisome divide between his science and art.

This chapter focuses on the life of Robert Marshall. Marshall dedicated his career to expanding the application of the natural sciences, especially his field of forestry. He recognized the primary flaw in progressive conservation: emphasizing nature's use made all questions of nature's value economic. He pushed scientists to understand the larger implications and social significance of their work. Most Americans knew nature only through limited personal experience. But like Clarence King, Robert Marshall believed that scientific study provided a unified and more complete picture of social relations and of the importance of nature to social health. The ideal product of such study was the modern American, an individual who understood that better living came through intimate contact with the natural world. Broadcasting this message on a wide scale would occupy the rest of his life.

Although the philosophers of the seventeenth century rejected the Aristotelian theory of the soul as the substantial form of the body, they did not always deviate from the Aristotelian conception of physics as the science of nature in general, including the human mind. The equation of natural science with antimetaphysical, quantitative experimentation is problematic on two counts. As an approach to history, it partakes of the worst failings of “presentism”; it ignores the self-understanding of earlier figures who considered themselves practitioners of natural science. Philosophically, it makes a crude positivist assumption that all progress in science is progress in the quantitative description of natural phenomena. This philosophical position should be resisted: not all natural scientific achievements are fundamentally quantitative, including achievements in two sciences that are closely related to psychology, namely, physiology and biology.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that nature continues to serve as a foundation for American political values, with natural science acting as guide. Key to its modern appeal is an understanding of science as an objective form of knowledge located within the authoritative natural world. The challenge for scientists and citizens alike is to recognize how much of our search for answers in the physical environment is not based on the ability of science to reveal what nature intended but is, rather, a necessary product of human relations in a social environment.

Most people are aware of the existence of theological incorrectness, but often dismiss it as a harmless bit of folk religion. Theological correctness, however, challenges every bit of conventional wisdom, as well as a great deal of scholarship on religion and how it works. Since theological incorrectness is natural, it can be analyzed by means of the methods employed by natural science.