Glanvill

Glanvill, Joseph (1636-80), an able writer who defended the belief in witchcraft, was born at Plymouth and educated at Oxford. He was at first a Nonconformist, but after the Restoration obtained several Church benefices, and was rector of Bath Abbey for 20 years. He was also chaplain to Charles II., and Prebendary of Worcester. A friend of Baxter, Cudworth, and More, he was one of the first fellows of the Royal Society. His fame rests upon The Vanity of Bogmatising (1661), in which was anticipated the invention of the electric telegraph, and Hume's theory of causation; and Skepsis Scientifica, a reissue of it, in which he advocated scientific as opposed to scholastic methods of reasoning. In his Sadducismus Triumpliatus (1671), and in aprevious work, he made an ingenious attempt to prove the existence of witches, and maintained that a disbelief in them necessarily involved atheism. He himself thought he had heard spectral drummings and seen supernatural manifestations in the house of a Mr. Mompesson, at Tedworth, Wiltshire.