The vanity of dogmatizing, or, Confidence in opinions
manifested in a discourse of the shortness and uncertainty of our knowledge,
and its causes: with some reflexions on peripateticism, and an apology for
philosophy / by Jos. Glanvill (1661)
It’s a learned work in which our learned author displays his
learning by listing all the processes and phenomena for which the learned world
provides no explanation: “we are as much non-plust by the most contemptible Worm, and Plant, we tread on.
How is a drop of Dew organiz'd into an Insect, or a lump of Clay into animal
Perfections? How are the Glories of the Field spun, and by what Pencil are they
limn'd in their unaffected bravery?”
Such learned disquisitions on our ignorance are of course sceptical
in stance. Richard Popkin, in his History of Scepticism, is kinder to Glanvill (I
think) than the author of the ODNB life, taking him seriously. In his time, Glanvill was answered by
Thomas White, An exclusion of scepticks from all title to dispute being an
answer to The vanity of dogmatizing (1665), who rather over-anxiously
sets off to warn the young wits of both universities against such a potentially
debilitating scepticism: “the studious of truth may understand it alike
dangerous to think every
thing and nothing is demonstrated.”
In Glanville’s book, knowledge has not been lost culturally in a
decline from the days of the ancients. He attacks Aristotle vigorously: “That
the Heavens are void of corruption, is Aristotles supposal: But
the Tube hath betray’d their impurity; and Neoterick
Astronomy hath found spots in the Sun.” Knowledge,
rather, has been lost from its high point in unfallen Eden. The normal human
condition is, for Glanvill, to be “naturally amorous of, and impatient for Truth, and yet averse to, and almost incapacitated for, that
diligent and painful search, which is necessary to its discovery.” In Glanvill’s
account, Adam is a fantasy figure, a hero with superpowers of knowledge, a
thought experiment about what a human being could know at an undiminished,
pre-lapsarian full capacity.
The very first sentence rumbles with that particular 17th
century plangency: “Our misery
is not of yesterday, but as antient as the first Criminal, and the ignorance we
are involved in, almost coaeval with the humane nature; not that we were made so by our God, but our
selves; we were his creatures, sin and misery were ours.”
But for all that relish of the gloom into which we have fallen, there’s
an excited sense that there are new heroes in thought (Descartes, Gassendi,
Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Henry More and, ominously enough, Sir Kenelm Digby), and
that new technologies can lift our perceptions up to the levels enjoyed by
Adam:
“Adam needed no
Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have
credit) shew’d him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo’s tube: And
'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper
World, as we with all the advantages of art.”
What seems
to me interesting about this is that Adam is not a static figure of perfection,
but enables Glanvill to think about what super-sensory powers might exist. His
Adam, we would say, is able to perceive much further along the electro-magnetic
spectrum. Glanvil’s Adam, able to perceive so much more, understands invisible
forces: the magnet, gravity, and (important for Glanvill) coherencies in the
nature of things, connections, all the 'sympathies' he thought Kenelm Digby was helping discover: “Sympathies and Antipathies were to him no occult qualities”
… “it appears to be most reasonable, that the circumference of our Protoplast’s senses, should
be the same with that of nature’s activity”
So Glanvill
pivots between a fantasy of the perfect knowledge of Adam in paradise, and the
present, in which new ideas may restore former states of insight and
understanding. Glanvill is aware of surmises about where long-hidden knowledge
can be re-found: “Modern Ingenuity expects Wonders from Magnetick discoveries”.
He comes up with an intelligent list of desiderata:
"It may be some Ages hence, a voyage to the Southern unknown Tracts, yea possibly the Moon, will not be more strange then one to America. To them, that come after us,
it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest Regions; as now a pair of Boots to ride a Journey. And to conferr at the
distance of the Indies by Sympathetick conveyances, may be
as usual to future times, as to us in a litterary correspondence. The restauration of gray hairs to Iuvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be
effected without a miracle: And
the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a Paradise, may not improbably be expected from late Agriculture."
There’s
the recurrent early modern fantasy of instant communication over distance,
here, not by using spirits, but by “Sympathetick conveyances”. Glanvill
does not at this point expound a view that Adam could have done this: that
would raise too many problems of its own. A telepathic Adam could have
forestalled the Fall. Instead, he tells, famously, the tale of the Scholar
Gypsy, an early modern Darren Brown who exerts mental control at distance over
the conversation of his old friends.
What
Glanvill comes up with next is not a story for a distinguished nineteenth
century poem. It’s another tale of remote connection, and details both the
potential and the drawbacks to having ‘sympathized hands’ (and, as they say,
‘Don’t try this at home’):
"That
some have conferr’d at distance
by sympathized hands, and in a moment have thus
transmitted their thoughts to each other, there are late specious relations do
attest it: which say, that the hands of two friends being sympathized by a transferring of flesh from one into the other, and the place
of the letters mutually agreed on; the least prick in
the hand of one, the other will be sensible of, and that in the same part of
his own. And thus the distant friend by a new kind of Chiromancy may read in his own hand what his
correspondent had set down in his. For instance, would I in London acquaint my intimate in Paris, that I am well:
I would then prick that part where I had appointed the letter [I:] and doing so in another place to signifie
that word was done, proceed to [A,]
thence to [M] and so on, till I had
finisht what I intended to make known. Now that there have been some such
practices, I have had a considerable relation, which I hold not impertinent to
insert. A Gentleman comes to a Chirurgeon to
have his arm cut off: The Surgeon perceiving nothing that
it ailed, was much startled at the motion; thinking him either in jest, or besides himself. But by a more deliberate
recollection, perceiving that he was both sober, and in earnest; entreats him
to know the reason of so strange a desire, since his arm to him seem’d
perfectly sound: to which the Gentleman replyes, that his hand was sympathiz’d, and his friend was dead, so that if not prevented by amputation, he said, it would rot away, as did
that of his deceased Correspondent. Nor was this an unreasonable
surmise; but, if there be any such way of manual Sympathizing, a very probable conjecture. For,
that which was so sensibly affected with so inconsiderable a touch, in all
likelyhood would be more immuted, by those greater alterations which are in Cadaverous Solutions."
One can, I think, feel reasonably certain that that never
happened (which is a relief). Glanvill is eager
to announce a breakthrough: these rather painful early modern text messages
have been sent and received (but there was a snag). His language is
interesting: “there are late specious relations do attest it”. Now, the OED
actually cites this very work for the first use of ‘specious’ in its current
sense: that is, sense ‘d. Of falsehood, bad
qualities, etc.’
1661 J. Glanvill Vanity of Dogmatizing, xii. 108 “Such an Infinite of uncertain opinions, bare
probabilities, specious falshoods.”
Yet here, the batty anecdote he retails is a ‘specious relation’
with ‘specious’ in older senses: pleasing, plausible. Glanvill also uses
‘speciousness’ in this work: “Self-designers are seldom disappointed, for want of the
speciousness of a cause to warrrant them” – what he means here is that we
always find reasons plausible to us to support our preconceptions. We are
supposed to deduce which precise meaning of a word is intended from the context
in which a word is used by an author, but Glanvill’s ‘specious relation’ seems
to me to say ‘specious falshood’ even before the anecdote is produced, the
sceptic in Glanvill discounting the newly uncovered way to use 'sympathies' even before he's told us about it.
Images from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vanitas
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