GLANVILL, or Glanvil, Joseph (1636-1680), was born at Plymouth in 1636, and was educated at Oxford university, where he graduated as M.A. in 1658. In 1666 he obtained the cure of Abbey Church at Bath; in 1678 he became prebendary of the church of Worcester, and acted as chaplain in ordinary to Charles II. He died at Bath, November 16, 1680, in the forty-fourth year of his age. Glanvill’s first work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, or Confidence in Opinions, manifested in a Discourse of the shortness and uncertainty of our Knowledge, and its Causes, ιvith Reflexions on Peripateticism, and an Apology for Philosophy, 1661, is interesting as showing one special direction in which the new method of the Cartesian philosophy might be developed. Pascal had already shown how philosophical scepticism might be employed as a bulwark for faith, and Glanvill follows in the same track. The philosophic endeavour to cognize the whole system of things by referring all events to their causes appears to him to be from the outset doomed to failure. For if we inquire into this causal relation we find that though we know isolated facts, we cannot perceive any such connexion between them as that the one should give rise to the other. In the words of Hume, “they seem conjoined but never connected.” All causes then are but secondary, are merely the occasions on which the one first cause operates. It is singular enough that Glanvill who had not only shown, but even exaggerated, the infirmity of human reason, himself paid a strange tribute to its weakness; for, after having combated scientific dogmatism, he not only yielded to vulgar superstitions, but actually endeavoured to accredit them both in his Scepsis Scientifica, 1665, and in his Philosophical Considerations concerning the [existence of ...