To the question, does the language of the will belong in science, there was no easy answer, since there had first to be a decision: what sort of science? Contemporary English speakers use the words ‘science’ and ‘natural science’ interchangeably and thus expect the history of science to be the history of natural science. If there is looseness, for example, in references to management science, it concerns occupations which claim or aspire to be like the natural sciences. Yet the usage is modern and distinctive to the Anglophone world. In the late Victorian period, though it was changing, authors frequently used the word ‘science’ to describe scholarship in history, jurisprudence, political economy (then breaking apart into political science, economics and economic history) and branches of philosophy (as in ‘the science of ethics’) and other fields. There was also, in particular, ‘moral science’ and ‘mental science’. As the account of shaping psychology discussed, there was substantial debate about the scope of natural science and the possibility for independent mental science.

I turn to examine the place of the will in ‘the science of history’, as some historians continued to call their field into the early decades of the twentieth century.