At the time, what they thought distinguished science was a radical idea about things unseen, known as empiricism.

After discovering that mathematics could be applied to understanding the physical world, a small group of natural philosophers turned toward experimental empiricism with practical objectives.

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that emphasizes the role of experience, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.

This view no doubt reflected a casual empiricism based on the mom and pop shops and small post offices that English dons saw when going outside their Oxbridge colleges.

The most famous philosophers of British Empiricism are John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume while Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid and William Hamilton were major exponents of the Scottish common sense school.

To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as the ultimate reality.

The basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life that we can do good things, that there are things worth doing because they're good things to do, and that clear eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them.