KNOWLEDGE is not accidental, nor is it predetermined. Knowledge does not evolve or develop. It forms, is organized, and it dissolves according to the contingencies and conjunctions managed by members of learned societies and clubs, elites certified (in most cases) by university educations and confirmed by memberships in learned bodies. Learned bodies are not passive vehicles. They are not uniform bodies with uniform histories or trajectories. It is not that such bodies are unbounded, but, as one scholar has pointed out, ‘these boundaries are always in the process of construction’. The historian’s task is to ‘highlight their unsettled nature’.

Approached from within, by examining their memberships, their programmes, and their social processes it is clear that each of them contained within themselves all sorts of inner differences and contradictions. They could hardly exercise cultural or political hegemony. Such associations were emotional, moral, and mental niches with their own openings and closings. They occupied only relatively segregated places and their members had overlapping loyalties. It was necessary for them to have both the robustness and common conviction to keep cognition from spinning out into nothingness, and, at the same time, they had to have the charisma of personal authority and individual imagination so that they could identify anomalies and project novelty. Chemists speak of potential energy barriers, points of resistance that take extraordinary energy to overcome. Knowledge niches provided the intellectual energy for overcoming such mental barriers. Peter Berger has called such knowledge niches sites for ‘collisions of consciousness’.

Some of these societies had long and distinguished histories – the Royal Society of London, the London Mathematical Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of Antiquaries, the British Academy – and continue on. Others were ephemeral – Appleton's Society for the Promotion of Research, the Metaphysical Society, the Synthetic Society – and passed in their time leaving behind productive residues.