Inspiration from the Growth of Natural Sciences

Nineteenth century was a period in which natural sciences had made much progress. The success attained by the natural scientists inspired and even tempted good number of social thinkers to emulate their example. If their methods could be successful in the physical world to understand physical or natural phenomena, could they not be applied successfully to the social world to understand social phenomena? As an answer to this question Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, Weber and others successfully demonstrated that these methods could be used to study the social world.