IN his ‘Agnostic's Apology’ Leslie Stephen set out his view of the scope of knowledge that people can claim to know. Doubting whether it is possible to draw the ‘map of the universe’ or even the map of our ‘infinitesimal parish’, he renounced ‘the attempt to get behind the veil’. However, he offered a way of proceeding: distrust the a priori and ruthlessly interrogate the evidence. This would provide ‘sufficient guidance for the needs of life’. In the passage quoted above, from his review of Arthur Balfour's Foundations of Belief (1895), Stephen struggled with the provisionalness of all knowledge. These were his ways of addressing how the work of learned societies, clubs, and coteries might be done.

What follows takes up three themes. First, these societies took up the question of research and scholarship, which pointed them in the direction of specialization. Second, however, it also led them towards various processes of intellectual border-crossing as they took up questions of religion, secularization, and literature. Third, the formation of knowledge also led them into the question of how knowledge should be organized and what form of academies might be suitable for British intellectual life. And this led them to consider their relationship to Continental forms of learning, especially German forms. The Great War was a testing point in this relationship.