William Whewell

William Whewell (1794–1866) was an English philosopher, historian of science and polymath, the son of a Lancaster carpenter, who rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, for twenty-five years. He wrote on mechanics, mineralogy, the tides, moral philosophy and architecture, coined the words scientist and physicist as well as the terms anode, cathode and ion for Michael Faraday, and was a founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His History of the Inductive Sciences of 1837 and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences of 1840 argued that scientific discovery proceeds by the colligation of facts under new conceptions, a view that influenced Mill.