associations voluntarily formed by a number of individuals for promoting knowledge, industry, or virtue. They may therefore be divided into three classes; societies for promoting science and literature, societies for encouraging and promoting arts and manufactures, and societies for diffusing religion and morality and relieving distress. Societies belonging to the first class extend their attention to all the sciences and literature in general, or devote it to one particular science. The same observation may be applied to those which are instituted for improving arts and manufactures. Those of the third class are established, either with a view to prevent crimes, as the Philanthropic Society; for the diffusion of the Christian religion among unenlightened nations, as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; or for introducing arts and civilization, along with a knowledge of the Christian religion, as the Sierra Leona company.

The honour of planning and instituting societies for those valuable purposes is due to modern times. A literary association is said to have been formed in the reign of Charlemagne (see Academy); but the plan seems to have been rude and defective. Several others were instituted in Italy in the 16th century; but from the accounts which we have seen of them, they seem to have been far inferior to those which are most flourishing at present. The most enlarged idea of literary societies seems to have originated with the great Lord Bacon, the father of modern philosophy, who recommended to the reigning prince to institute societies of learned men, who should give to the world from time to time a regular account of their researches and discoveries. It was the idea of this great philosopher, that the learned world should be united, as it were, into one immense republic; which, though consisting of many detached states, should hold a strict union and preserve a mutual intelligence with each other, in every thing that regards the common interest. The want of this union and intelligence he laments as one of the chief obstructions to the advancement of science; and, justly considering the institution of public societies, in the different countries of Europe, under the auspices of the sovereign, to be the best remedy for that defect, he has given, in his fanciful work, the New Atlantis, the delineation of a philosophical society.