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This increasing specialisation was manifested in and facilitated by other social and intellectual trends so pervasive and profound that they may be regarded as definitive of modernity: secularisation (Chadwick, 1975), professionalisation, commercialisation, and quantification. Detached from its moorings in theology, the search for knowledge could be pursued in regions of whose very existence traditional teachings gave no inkling, and it could provide alternative explanations to biblically based accounts for natural phenomena. No longer a church monopoly, knowledge could be investigated by laymen: aristocrats and the well-to-do to start with, but once the intellectual, social, and material benefits began to flow, and with the spread of education and industry, it could be investigated by ever-wider sections of society. These men, and a very few women, literally made their living through the acquisition and implementation of knowledge, leading to the formation of new categories of social identity: “professional”, “scientist”, “researcher”, “bureaucrat”, “expert”, and so on, all the way through to today’s “forensic entomologists” or “domain-specific discourse analysts”. Indeed, it can be argued that “identity” in this modern knowledge-based sense filled the conceptual gap formed by the progressive rejection of the “soul” as a satisfactory approach to a wide range of phenomena which could be anachronistically labelled “psychological”, “social”, “cultural”, “anthropological”, and so on (Porter, 2003; Taylor, 1989).
These individuals largely shared a set of intellectual tools which allowed them, in Bacon’s words, “to interrogate nature” through measures and measurement: experimentation and statistics, in particular. This common methodological basis was one of the most important factors which made it possible to form the social groups from which modern disciplines emerged. In stark contrast to the mediaeval alchemist working in solitary secrecy, they formed what Etienne Wenger (1998) has called “communities of practice”, where prestige, authority, and, progressively, financial advantage were conferred by priority of publication, placing knowledge in the public domain.