318 Thurs
and divines neglect to settle where the boundary lines are in the disputed
territory,” which in this case was the explanation of religious conversion,
“infi del trespassers will commit depredations.”^39 However, an increasing
number of attempts to confi ne the study of nature with traditional meth-
odological catchwords involved abandoning the universal application of
inductive and Baconian method. The Reverend A. F. Hewit, a prominent
Catholic apologist, sounded a common refrain when he reminded his
readers that induction could not lead one to God. The astronomer could
not see Heaven. Yet, lamented another author, the scientist “used to the
precise terminology of science” in the material realm and “unused to any
sharp thinking or precise terminology in intellectual or spiritual phenom-
ena” seemed to believe he could solve the mysteries of the life and the
universe from “within the narrow limits of his lab, among instruments of
death.” In such cases, people had a “right to demand that Science shall
confi ne herself to facts.” This view often implied a methodological gap
between natural science, which relied on induction, and theology, which
“as a science, is deductive.”^40
It was a short step from limiting induction to the realm of natural sci-
ence to discussion of some method particularly scientifi c, whether induc-
tive or not. In such cases, a stricter image of science, refl ected in references
to a peculiarly scientifi c method, operated to keep scientists confi ned to
their chosen fi eld of expertise rather that to protect it from nonscientists.
In his Natural and the Supernatural, Horace Bushnell warned readers of too
much confi dence in the methods of science, “as if nothing could be true,
save as it is proved by the scientifi c method.” Instead, he noted that “the
method of all the higher truths of religion is different, being the method
of faith; a verifi cation by the heart, and not by the notions of the head.”
Similarly, an author speculating on the future of human character in the
Ladies’ Repository refl ected that “every generation, as it accumulated fresh
illustrations of the scientifi c method, is more and more embarrassed at
how to piece them in with that far grander and nobler personal discipline
of the soul which hears in every circumstance of life some new word of
command from the living God.”^41
A narrow and exclusive view of the scientifi c method appeared in
other contexts, too, far removed from religious controversy. Using a sci-
entifi c method often meant simply being thorough and careful, without
any particular connection to the study of nature. In 1860, an author of a
serialized work of fi ction described a bank customer’s impatience with the
teller’s “scientifi c method” of counting money.^42 Increasingly, however,
in some usage that caution and concern for detail came to be contrasted
with being lively and engaging in a way that more fi rmly inscribed a line