Note 143 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

One clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, is found publishing a treatise on The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661; amended in 1665 under the title Scepsis Scientifica),143 wherein, with careful reservation of religion, the spirit of critical science is applied to the ordinary processes of opinion with much energy, and the “mechanical philosophy” of Descartes is embraced with zeal. Following Raleigh and Hobbes,144 Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation145 afterwards fully developed by Hume.146 Yet he not only vetoed all innovation in “divinity,” but held stoutly by the crudest forms of the belief in witchcraft, and was with Henry More its chief English champion in his day against rational disbelief.147 In religion he had so little of the skeptical faculty that he declared “Our religious foundations are fastened at the pillars of the intellectual world, and the grand articles of our belief as demonstrable as geometry. Nor will ever either the subtile attempts of the resolved Atheist, or the passionate hurricanes of the wild enthusiast, any more be able to prevail against the reason our faith is built on, than the blustering winds to blow out the Sun.”148 He had his due reward in being philosophically assailed by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism,149 and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and all its works, as an infidel and an atheist.150