Joseph Glanvill Quotes on Knowledge
Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) and Scepsis Scientifica (1665) gave the early Royal Society and the broader seventeenth-century English natural-philosophical tradition its most influential statement of mitigated scepticism in the philosophy of knowledge. The central commitments — that the dogmatic certainty of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition cannot be sustained under careful philosophical scrutiny, that genuine human knowledge proceeds through the patient probable inquiry the new experimental philosophy exemplifies, and that the parallel investigation of witchcraft and apparitions (Saducismus Triumphatus, 1681) is methodologically continuous with the broader empirical natural-philosophical project — articulate a distinctive late-Renaissance synthesis of scepticism with the new science. The framework shaped subsequent English natural philosophy through the Royal Society’s investigative culture and the broader seventeenth-century engagement with the conditions of probable scientific knowledge.
Quotes
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Attributed to Joseph Glanvill:
“We dogmatize in proportion to our ignorance.”
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Attributed to Joseph Glanvill:
“Knowledge is much advanced by the comparison of opinions.”
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Attributed to Joseph Glanvill:
“The new philosophy frees us from the tyranny of authority.”
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Attributed to Joseph Glanvill:
“What we call certainty is rarely more than the absence of doubt.”
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Attributed to Joseph Glanvill:
“Inquiry is the proper duty of every rational soul.”
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“For Mathematical Sciences , he that doubts their certainty, hath need of a dose of Hellebore .”
Ch. 21 -
“The knowledge we have of the Mathematicks , hath no reason to elate us; since by them we know but numbers , and figures , creatures of our own, and are yet ignorant of our Maker's .”
Ch. 21 -
“The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden .”
Ch. 15 -
“The Understanding also hath its Idiosyncrasies , as well as other faculties.”
Ch. 15 -
“Ch. 17 — Cf. Francis Bacon”
Time as a River , hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial; while things more solid and substantial have been immersed. -
“The precipitancy of disputation , and the stir and noise of Passions, that usually attend it, must needs be prejudicial to Verity .”
Ch. 19 -
“Though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility; there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.”
No. 2 — "Of Scepticism and Certainty