Scepsis
Scientifica,
Or, The Vanity of Dogmatizing
By
Joseph Glanvill.
Fans of
Victorian poetry will be familiar with Matthew Arnold's poem The Scholar-Gipsy. This is based on the story of an
Oxford scholar who abandoned his studies and joined a Gipsy tribe, but many
years later met some friends from Oxford and told them how he had learned
psychic techniques from them. The
story came from Glanvill's Scepsis Scientifica, which we have here.
Joseph Glanvill was an English cleric and
philosopher who lived from 1636–1680. He was a latitudinarian in religion,
advocating religious tolerance, and his philosophy was derived from Descartes.
He proposed in his Scepsis Scientifica a programme of open-minded examination
of evidence and a rejection of appeals to authority or pre-judgement of
proposals based on an inflexible set of principles.
Glanvil's work has
also influenced Edgar Allen Poe
and Aleister Crowley, as well as Matthew Arnold.
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