Glanvill, JOSEPH

Glanvill, JOSEPH, was born at Plymouth in 1636, entered Exeter College, Oxford, in 1652, and took his degree in due course, residing afterwards at Lincoln College. The dominant Aristotelianism of Oxford weighed on him almost as heavily as the prevailing Puritan dogmatism of the outer world—he would have breathed more freely in the air of Cambridge, and so have reached the 'new philosophy' of Descartes by a much shorter route. After the Restoration, Wood tells us that he 'turned about and became a Latitudinarian.' He took orders, and was appointed in 1662 to the vicarage of Frome in Somerset, which he exchanged in 1672 for the rectory of Street in the same county. Already in 1666 he had become rector of the Abbey Church in Bath, and in 1678 he was installed prebendary of Worcester. He died of fever in 1680, and was buried in the north aisle of the Abbey Church at Bath. Glanvill early succeeded in shaking himself free from religious and scientific dogmatism, and his famous work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, or Confidence in Opinions (1661), was a noble appeal for freethought and experimental science. In its second issue (1665) it took the new title of Scēpsis Scientifica, or Confest Ignorance the Way to Science, prefaced by a warm panegyric on the newly-founded Royal Society, of which he had become a fellow the year before (new ed., with introductory essay by John Owen, 1885). A strong sense of the infirmity of human reason was a fundamental axiom in Glanvill's thought; and a striking corollary to this was his credulity as to witchcraft, seen in his Philosophical Considerations touching the Being of Witches and Witchcraft (1666), and in later books suggested by the doings of the invisible drummer at Mr Mompesson's house at Tedworth, Wiltshire, in 1663. His notions on this subject are seen further in the posthumous Sadducismus Triumphatus, or a Full and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions (1681). The book is inductive in the form of its argument, the proof being based on a collection of modern relations, but of course it is based upon a fundamental misconception of the nature of human testimony. Glanvill maintained that Atheism was begun in Sadducism, and that witches disproved, all spiritual existence vanished with them. His superstition was at least a relief from the gross materialism that was the inevitable reaction from Puritan dogmatism; and, if it was really unphilosophical, it was shared by Boyle, Henry More, Baxter, and Cudworth.