The best idea in chapter 6 is... that of a methodological focus on practical problems: "This was not an abstract, intellectual event, but, as always in the taming of chance, a practical attack on an immediate and material problem" (p. 48).
The best idea in chapter 7 is... that sometimes we travel 'the road from scientific law to scientific measurement' (Kuhn) in the opposite direction, moving from numbers to law, which is heroized less by the grand theoretical scientist and more by the armies of counting bureaucrats (see p. 62). The numbers give us a wealth of data for making "more inductions". The 19th century search for constants in the numerical data, and found there 'laws' (which today we might call 'regularities' looking forward to p. 128). The search for constants is epitomized in Babbage (cf. 58-9). The years in which this searching stabilized was 1820 to 1840. This was (for us) a platform leveraging the previously stabilized platform of bureaux of enumeration which had stabilized a little earlier, 1800s and 1810s.
The best idea in chapter 8 is... that, for Esquirol, "Madess... was English." This is part of an account of how the very first self-consciously statistical laws were conceived in explanatory terms (p. 71); this was (as later chapters argue) not an easy combination.
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