The last meeting of the society was held on 16 May 1880 and it was dissolved later in November of that year. Huxley said that it died "of too much love"; Tennyson, "because after ten years of strenuous effort no one had succeeded in even defining metaphysics." According to Dean Stanley, "We all meant the same thing if we only knew it."

In 1877 Knowles founded ''The Nineteenth Century'', a literary journal whose editorial style was partly