JOSEPH GLANVILL.* Or Joseph Glanvill Mr. Lecky has said in
his History of Rationalism that he was "a divine, who in his own day was very famous, and who, I venture to think, has been surpassed in genius by few of his successors." The brief account of Glanvill given by Mr. Lecky is in the present volume largely supple- mented and expanded. Dr. Greenslet has, in fact, told us all of Glanvill which it is possible to know, and that is not very much. Of few English writers of equal power do we know so little. But Dr. Greenslet has done something more useful than gossip about a dead author; he has related him to the general intellectual movement of the time, and has therefore written a valuable chapter in the history of English philosophic thought. For Glanvill lived in an intellectual as well as in a political crisis. The Cartesian philosophy was influ- encing the English mind, a revolt against the empire of Aristotelian thought was in progress, one of the few native schools of English philosophy — that of the Cambridge Platonists—was in full sway, and the so-called Latitudinarian theology (an early adumbration of the Broad Church move- ment) was greatly modifying the character of the Church of England. Rarely, indeed, has there been a greater ferment in English thought; and in no mind is that ferment more manifest than in that of this strange and little known figure who is generally identified with the defence of the facts of witchcraft. Mr. Lecky would seem to know Glanvill mainly in this latter capacity. But Dr. Greenslet surveys Glanvill's work all round, and, as we have said, relates him to the thought of his time, and that is the reason why we think this study of so striking a figure of considerable value.
Glanvill was born at Plymouth in 1636 of a very old and famous family. We know absolutely nothing of him till he entered Oxford in 1652, graduating in 1655. The Oxford of that day, dominated by the Puritans under Owen, gave to him, says Dr. Greenslet, "a sound and solid training in classics and logic, and a keen personal interest in the method and problems of natural science." In 1658 Glanvill became chaplain to Francis Eons, friend of Cromwell, who had been also Speaker of the " Barebones " Parlia- ment, and then Provost of Eton. Glanvill had been for the Commonwealth cause, but it is said of him that "after his Majesty's restoration, by deeply weighing matters he became convinced of his mistaken notions." This sounds rather ironical, but Dr. Greenslet does not think Glanvill a mere Vicar of Bray. In 1660 he was presented by his brother with an Essex living which allowed him quiet and leisure for writing, but two years after he went to Frome Selwood in Somersetshire, and in 1665 he became rector of the Abbey Church at Bath, already a centre of fashion, this being one of the most desirable livings in England. In the same year he was elected Fellow of the newly founded Royal Society. Glanvill was apparently not a model of ultra- decorum, though we must allow for the horrible laxity of the age, for we not only find him discussing the supernatural world with learned men, but drinking rather deep with Pepys and others of the natural world. He seems to have been an authority on drink. "A man cannot," he writes in a paper on the Bath waters read before the Royal Society, "drink half the quantity of strong drink in this bath that he can out of it; but if he have drunk before to excess it allays much
• Joseph : a Study in Bnglish Thought and Letters of the Seventeenth Century. By Ferris Greenslet, Ph.D. New York : The Columbia University Psvas.
and is a great refreshment to the body." Glanvill seems to have bad some local troubles, for we hear of his "preaching twice a day to angry mobs," and declaring that "be who will be a minister must be content to be a martyr." He is described as "spruce and trim" and " romantick in preach- ing." He entered into several controversies, for it was "his nature to." He was married twice, died in 1680, and was buried in the Abbey Church of Bath.
Philosophically Glanvill was an eclectic, with no definite body of philosophic doctrine, but . with a remarkable faculty for apprehending and assimilating the new ideas of his time. "His philosophy, like a chameleon, took some shades of colour from the ground it was upon; now sceptical with Sextus Empiricus, anon Pythagorean with More, rationalistic with Descartes, or experimental with Bacon, it finally culminated: in a reasonable and broad-minded. Platonism." His initial motive force was revolt against Aristotle, whose long dominion over the schools had been overthrown, but the grounds of his revolt, unless only partly stated, are very weak. 'The reinstatement of Plato by the Florentine Academy, the philosophy of Descartes, the new development of physical science, the work of Hobbes, were all making against any universal philosophic dominion, and were again turning back the mind of Europe on itself. It was a time of eagerness, dogmatism, and conflict, and Glanvill, whose natural bias was sceptical, conceived the ideal of a "quiet and fearless mind" with a "fixed stability," expressed in a gentle attitude of "philosophic doubt." In this spirit he wrote his Vanity of Dogmatizing and his Scepsis Scientifica. But along with a philosophic agnosticism went a religious mysticism which attracted him to Plato and partly allied him with More and the Cambridge Platonists, and this attitude is expressed in his Lux Oriento2is, an exposition of the Platonic doctrine of pre-existence. His epistemology may be inferred from his statement of the three stages of knowledge:—(1) apprehension grounded on sensitive perception; (2) forming of propositions through identity and distinction; (3) faculty of joining pro- positions in a chain of inferential reasoning. In the Plus Ultra we have, perhaps, the clearest hints of Glanvill's approximation to the ideas of modern philosophy. His theory of the world was, as Dr. Greenslet says, "a modified atomism" combined with the Platonic anima mandi acting as medium between God and Nature. The influence of the Cartesian philosophy was, of course, to strengthen this dualism. But we must again say that no coherent body of doctrine must be sought in Glanvill. There are hints, flashes, ingenious theorisings, but scarcely anything more.
We have purposely said nothing of the celebrated work by which Glanvill is best known, the Sadducismus Triumpliatus, the strongest defence of the alleged facts of witchcraft produced by any English writer, because Glanvill is generally treated as though that were his sole work. It is true he devoted much of his life to the investigation of stories of "possession," and the fact that he was on the one hand a thinker and a member of the Royal Society, and on the other a deluded witch-hunter, has struck people who know about him as one of the most curious paradoxes on record. To such may be commended the interesting chapter in this work on "Ghost Stories and Witchcraft," in which Glanvill is justly treated "as a man who, in this matter, laid hold of a great truth, though shrouded in earthly error." Deeper research into the "abysmal deeps of personality" has not altogether confirmed the dogmatism of a clear but shallow "rationalism." And as for the too easy credulity, not only of Glanvill but of so powerful a mind as that of Chief Justice Hale, we may say with Dr. Greenslet, "How far are all our opinions only the products of the convention and fashion of our age P"
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