Note 84:1 — Chapter II
Reading edition
"Scepsis Scientifica; or, Confest Ignorance the Way to Science, in an essay of the vanity of dogmatizing and confident opinion." By Joseph Glanvill, M.A. 1665, 4to, p. 142. See this coincidence commented on in the Penny Cyclopædia, art. Scepticism. The style of Glanvill's work, in its rich variety of logical imagery and its powerful use of antithesis, is formed on that of Sir Thomas Browne, whose "Vulgar Errors" had been first published fifteen years earlier. That one who wrote a book so full of wisdom—so bold, original, and firm in its attacks on received fallacies, should also have been the champion of belief in witchcraft, in which his prototype, Sir Thomas Browne, was also a believer, is one of those inconsistencies in poor human nature, which elicit much wonder, but no explanation. The following passages from this curious and rare book are offered for the reader's amusement:—
"We conclude many things impossibilities, which yet are easie feasables. For by an unadvised transiliency, leaping from the effect to its remotest cause, we observe not the connexion through the interposal of more immediate causalities, which yet at last bring the extremes together without a miracle. And hereupon we hastily conclude that impossible which we see not in the proximate capacity of its efficient."—pp. 83-84.
"From this last-noted head ariseth that other of joyning causes with irrelevant effects, which either refer not at all unto them, or in a remoter capacity. Hence the Indian conceived so grossly of the letter that discovered his theft; and that other who thought the watch an animal. From hence grew the impostures of charmes and amulets, and other insignificant ceremonies; which to this day impose upon common belief, as they did of old upon the barbarism of the uncultivate heathen. Thus effects unusual, whose causes run under ground, and are more remote from ordinary discernment, are noted in the book of vulgar opinion with digitus Deî, or Dæmonis; though they owe no other dependence to the first than what is common to the whole syntax of beings, nor yet any more to the second than what is given it by the imagination of those unqualified judges. Thus, every unwonted meteor is portentous; and the appearance of any unobserved star, some divine prognostick. Antiquity thought thunder the immediate voyce of Jupiter, and impleaded them of impiety that referred it to natural causalities. Neither can there happen a storm at this remove from antique ignorance, but the multitude will have the Devil in it."—pp. 84-85.
On the Influence of Education.
"We judge all things by our anticipations; and condemn or applaud them, as they agree or differ from our first receptions. One country laughs at the laws, customs, and opinions of another as absurd and ridiculous; and the other is as charitable to them in its conceit of theirs."—pp. 93-94.
"Thus, like the hermite, we think the sun shines nowhere but in our cell, and all the world to be darkness but ourselves. We judge truth to be circumscribed by the confines of our belief, and the doctrines we were brought up in; and, with as ill manners as those of China, repute all the rest of the world monoculous. So that, what some astrologers say of our fortunes and the passages of our lives, may, by the allowance of a metaphor, be said of our opinions—that they are written in our stars, being to the most as fatal as those involuntary occurrences, and as little in their power as the placits of destiny. We are bound to our country's opinions as to its laws; and an accustomed assent is tantamount to an infallible conclusion. He that offers to dissent shall be an outlaw in reputation; and the fears of guilty Cain shall be fulfilled on him—whoever meets him shall slay him."—pp. 95-96.
"We look with superstitious reverence upon the accounts of preterlapsed ages, and with a supercilious severity on the more deserving products of our own—a vanity which hath possessed all times as well as ours; and the golden age was never present. . . . We reverence gray-headed doctrines, though feeble, decrepit, and within a step of dust: and on this account maintain opinions which have nothing but our charity to uphold them."—p. 102.