Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Some Preliminary Conjectures
- Chapter 1 University Clubs and Societies and the Organization of Knowledge
- Chapter 2 Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries: Some Knowledge Nodes
- Chapter 3 Members of Learned Societies
- Chapter 4 Matter: The Work of Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries
- Chapter 5 Manner: The Formation of Commensurability
- Chapter 6 Knowledge and Power
- Some Concluding Observations
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Manner: The Formation of Commensurability
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Some Preliminary Conjectures
- Chapter 1 University Clubs and Societies and the Organization of Knowledge
- Chapter 2 Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries: Some Knowledge Nodes
- Chapter 3 Members of Learned Societies
- Chapter 4 Matter: The Work of Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries
- Chapter 5 Manner: The Formation of Commensurability
- Chapter 6 Knowledge and Power
- Some Concluding Observations
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As far as my own experience goes, the more one learns, the more one's sense of ignorance increases, and that in more than double measure. We can only go blundering on according to our best lights, hoping that sooner or later the blunders will be corrected by others.
Fenton John Anthony Hort (1890)[F]or there is no more effectual method of clearing up one's own mind on any subject than by talking it over, so to speak, with men of real power and grasp who have considered it from a totally different point of view.
T. H. HuxleyHORT 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’.
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- Only Connect: Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain , pp. 201 - 236Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015