Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
In Glanvill's treatise the action of debt is found already to be one of the well-known remedies. But the law of those days was still in a somewhat primitive state, and it will easily be imagined that a form of action which goes back as far as that was not founded on any very delicate discriminations.
The difference in general outlook between these two clergymen is an indication how the world had travelled in the course of forty years. Another point in Glanvill's little book deserves attention. He takes into his prospect the inhabitants of the Transatlantic world; they, too, are to share in the benefits which shall result from the subjugation of nature.
It would be foolhardy indeed for a layman to attempt an elucidation of the subtleties either of this philosophy or of the processes of Glanvill's philosophical reasoning. His point of view was partially unfolded in the Scepsis Scientifica, published in 1665 and dedicated to the Royal Society.
FOOTNOTES: [B] Glanvill's "Sadducismus Triumphatus," a most instructive and entertaining contribution to the literature of witchcraft. Contemporary opinion of Glanvill is well expressed in Anthony
One of the most popular books of the generation, it proved to be Glanvill's greatest title to contemporary fame. The success of the work was no doubt due in large measure to the collection of witch stories; but these had been inserted by the author as the groundwork of his argument.
Sprat, the Bishop of Rochester, in his interesting History of the Royal Society, so sensible and liberal published shortly before Glanvill's book, also contemplates the extension of science over the world.
Glanvill's personal testimony, the most precise and circumstantial in the entire case, strongly, albeit unwittingly, supports this view of the affair. It appears that he passed only one night in the haunted house, and of his several experiences there is none that cannot be set down to fraud plus imagination, with the children the active agents.
Glanvill's house, there being none there but a maydeservant and a young man; being in some pain, partly from not knowing what to do in this business, having a mind to be at a certainty in my profit, and partly through his having Jacke sicke still, and his blackemore now also fallen sicke. So he being gone, I to bed. 28th. 29th.
To us it declares what that law was at the opening of its far-reaching history, and in its definiteness and certainty as well as in its arrangement it reveals the great progress that had been made since the law books of the reign of Henry I. That progress continued so rapid that within a hundred years Glanvill's book had become obsolete, but by that time it had been succeeded by others in the long series of great books on our common law.
It was along this line, indeed, that he made his most important contribution to the controversy then going on. Glanvill had urged that disbelief in witchcraft was but one step in the path to atheism. No witches, no spirits, no immortality, no God, were the sequences of Glanvill's reasoning.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking