HORT was to die shortly after penning the above words, but he had been an Apostle, a member of the New Testament Revision Company, and the Alpine Club. His correspondent, Joseph Armitage Robinson, was a member of the Synthetic Society, an early Fellow of the British Academy, and became Dean of Westminster. Both were members of that miscellaneous, ‘unanchored’, and ‘relatively’ classless social stratum to which members of learned societies belonged. Socially miscellaneous, members of learned societies and coteries had no common doctrine, but their procedures, the processes by which they worked, created a climate of commensurability. These relations were soldered together (if that is not too strong a verb to use in describing such fragile relations) by emotional and charismatic values rather than formal, institutional, bureaucratic values. Early in the careers of T. H. Huxley and Sir John Lubbock, before they were joined together in the Metaphysical Society, the Royal Society, the X-Club, or The Club, Huxley wrote to Lubbock about their relationship: ‘It is not very often that I find anyone who can or will work philosophically.’

Commensurability was not necessarily agreement; it was an intellectual and emotional framework, or mental site, within which people might agree or disagree. It provided a dexterity, agility, and suppleness that allowed for differences and ambiguities, which in turn could open the way for intellectual opportunities and improvisations. Jane Ellen Harrison, in the paper she read to the Cambridge Heretics Society in 1909, set out the emotional and mental values associated with commensurability. People belonging to such groups and other learned societies, she said, needed ‘new heads, new hearts’ and a ‘new emotional imagination’ provided by ‘enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling’.