 Even at the time Shepherd and her husband resided in Cambridge, Whewell was the leader of a group of four friends who were undertaking to reform the practice of the sciences. Taking Francis Bacon’s The Great Instauration (1620) as starting point, they vowed to work as philosophers and scientists to regularize the practice of science, expand it, and orient it to the improvement of human lives. Together with others, they had considerable success in this endeavor over the next four decades. Of the four friends, three proposed methods of induction for natural science, each of them opposed to that of the others. Whewell’s methodology, which is the most fully developed, is like Shepherd’s in being neither rationalist nor empiricist, but combining ideas drawn from the mind itself with empirical input. Whether or not Shepherd meet any one in this circle prior to publishing her first book, she shared with them a deep conviction that the current state of philosophy was inadequate to support scientific inquiry. She undertook to put causal reasoning in all areas of human endeavor including empirical research on firm metaphysical and epistemic foundations (also McRobert 2002 under  Other Internet Resources).  