Deeply influenced by Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley and Rammohan Roy, he was among the first few men in modern India who had presented an empiricist critique of the ancient Indian philosophies.
Part I motivates the study of the individual in psychology, provides a framework for contrasting nativist and empiricist views and provides a history of psychology that traces its gradual independence from physiology and philosophy to a subject in its own right.
Alan of Lille supports the empiricist Pauline claim that the “invisible things of God are known through the visible things that are made”, but with a different context, whereby the kind of knowledge in question is the “knowledge” of faith, not of the world.
Through his work, Voltaire criticized religious figures and philosophers such as the optimists Alexander Pope and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but endorsed the views of the skeptic Pierre Bayle and empiricist John Locke.
Throughout its history the society has promoted collegiality amongst its members, however, as Julia Gatley has written, this history has not been without its tensions, particularly between the empiricist historians and those with a commitment to theory. (Gatley, J. 'SAHANZ: the first 50 years', in Fabrications 13, 2, May 2004, pp. 63–77.) The society is a partner organisation of the Society of Architectural Historians (USA).
An empiricist in his anthropology and a Lamarckian before Lamarck, he sought to mediate between science and religious orthodoxy.