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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