GLANVILL (or GLANVIL), JOSEPH (1636-168o), English philosopher, was born at Plymouth and educated at Oxford. Af ter the Restoration he was successively rector of Wimbush, Essex, vicar of Frome Selwood, Somersetshire, rector of Streat and Wal ton. In 1666 he was appointed to the abbey church, Bath; in 1678 he became prebendary of Worcester Cathedral, and acted as chaplain in ordinary to Charles II. from 1672. He died at Bath Nov. 4, 1680. Glanvill's first work (a passage in which sug gested the theme of Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gipsy), The Vanity of Dogmatizing, etc. (1661) , shows how philosophical scepticism might be employed as a bulwark for faith. The endeavour to cog nize the whole system of things by referring all events to their causes appears to him to be doomed to failure from the outset. We know isolated facts, but we cannot perceive any such connec tion between them as that the one should give rise to the other. In the words of Hume, "they seem conjoined but never con nected." All causes then are merely the occasions on which the one first cause operates. Glanvill rejected the scholasticism and Aristotelianism of his own university for the Platonism of Cam bridge, writing in 1662 the Lux Orientalis which reproduced Henry More's theory of the pre-existence of the soul. In spite of his admission of the defects of our knowledge, Glanvill yielded to vulgar superstitions, and actually endeavoured to accredit them both in his revised edition of the Vanity of Dogmatizing, pub lished as Scepsis scientifica (1665), and in his Philosophical Con siderations concerning the existence of Sorcerers and Sorcery (1666) . The latter work was based on the story of the drum alleged to have been heard every night in a house in Wiltshire (Tedworth, belonging to a Mr. Mompesson), a story which made much noise in the year 1663, and which is supposed to have fur nished Addison with the idea of his comedy The Drummer. Glan vill's Sadducismus Triumphatus, printed posthumously in 1681, also defends witchcraft ; but he supported a more honourable cause in his defence of the Royal Society of London, as Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of Science since the time of Aris totle (1668), a work showing his empirical tendencies.
See F. Greenslet, 1. Glanvill (New York, 1900).