Most contributions to Whewell scholarship have tended to stress the idealistic, antiempirical temper of Whewell’s philosophy. Thus, the only two monograph-length studies on Whewell, Blanché’s Le Rationalisme de Whewell and Marcucci’s L’ ‘Idealismo’ Scientifico di William Whewell, are, as their titles suggest, concerned primarily with Whewell’s departures from classical British empiricism. Particularly in his famous dispute with Mill, it has proved tempting to parody Whewell’s position in the debate by treating it as a straightforward encounter between an arch-empiricist and an (...) arch-rationalist. There is, however, a danger that an emphasis on the necessitarian and a priori elements in Whewell’s philosophy may well obscure the unmistakable empirical emphasis in Whewell’s theory of science. I think it is time to begin to redress the balance, by focusing attention on the significant ‘empiricist’ strains in Whewell’s philosophy of science. One of the most important of those strains is connected with the operation which Whewell calls ‘the consilience of inductions’. (shrink)