Abstract
By the time Hogarth published his print “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism” in 1762, belief in witches and apparitions had all but disappeared among the educated classes. Joseph Glanvill’s once famous book, Saducismus Triumphatus: or Full and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions, published with Henry More’s copious annotations three times in the seventeenth century and twice more in the eighteenth, had become an object of curiosity, a relic of those past popular delusions ridiculed in the age of Enlightenment. Once credited with putting ‘the belief in apparitions and witchcraft on an unshakable basis of science and philosophy’.1 Glanvill’s book appears in Hogarth’s picture as the ultimate source of that credulity, superstition, and fanaticism delineated by the artist so carefully and so critically. Placed in the bottom right-hand corner, Glanvill’s work provides a platform, first, for Wesley’s Sermons and, then, for a human heart in which a thermometer has been inserted with degrees of heat registered in terms of passions and mental disorders. The scale begins with suicide, madness and despair and ends in lust, ecstasy, convulsive fits, and raving. Superstition and credulity, represented by Glanvill and Wesley, thus provide the foundation for the varying degrees of insanity and fanaticism depicted by Hogarth.
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References
George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928), 335. He continues, ‘No English work on the subject had a more powerful influence’.
Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus (1681), 169–71. Reproduced on p. viii of this volume, Hogarth’s print also features the drummer of Tedworth, surmounting the thermometer on the right of the picture.
The lower estimate is given by E. William Monter, ‘The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft,’ in Becoming Visible, ed. R. Bridenthal & C. Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 130.
the higher by G.R. Quaife, Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987) 79. Brian Levack gives a figure of 60,000 in The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (New York: Longmans, 1987), 19–21.
Boguet, Discours des Sorciers (Lyon, 1602), Dedication to the Vicar-General of Besançon, XXXIV: ‘There are witches by the thousand everywhere, multiplying upon the earth even as worms in a garden’.
H.R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 80.
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and James R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Franklin, 1977), e.g. p. 158–9.
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More may have been influenced Bacon’s suggestion that cases of witchcraft should be collected as part of the natural “History of Marvels”. See n. 31 below.
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More defines ‘nullibists’ as those ‘who forsooth, imagine themselves so superlatively intellectual above other men, in declaring that God is nowhere, although they cannot deny but that he is’. DD, 1: sig. A3r. More, EM, chap. 27, in Opera, 2: 307.
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Ibid. (1682), 2:1–2.
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More, “Dr. H.M. his letter” and Glanvill, “A Whip for a Droll Fiddler”, from Saducismus Triumphatus. Jacob Koelman, Wederlegging van B. Bekkers Betoverde Wereldt. Met een Aan-hangsel,... Henricus Morus... (1692), which prints More’s letter from Saducismus Triumphatus. For a discussion of the Bekker affair, see R. Colie, “Sir Thomas Browne’s Entertainment in Seventeenth-century Holland”, Neophilologus, 26 (1952): 162–71.
These are printed in Charles Webster, “Henry More and Descartes”, 365 and 370.
More, CSPW, AA, 6–7.
More, MG, Preface, p.vii.
Glanvill, “Usefulness of Real Philosophy”, p. 5 in Essays (1675).
Bacon, Advancement of Learning, bk. 2, chap. 2, in Works, ed. J. Spedding & R.L. Ellis (London, 1870–72), 4: 296. ‘Neither am I of opinion in this history of marvels, that superstitious narratives of sorceries, witchcrafts, charmes, dreames, divinations, and the like, where there is an assurance and clear evidence of the fact, should be altogether excluded. For it is not yet known in what cases, and how far, effects attributed to superstition participate of natural causes; and therefore howsoever the use and practice of such arts is to be condemned, yet from the speculation and consideration of them (if they be diligently unravelled) a useful light may be gained, not only for the true judgement of the offences of persons charged with such practices, but like-wise for the further discolsing of the secrets of nature’.
Glanvill, A Blow at Modern Sadducism (London, 1668), 94–5. Some members of the Royal
Society apparently did proceed with such investigations. Robert Plot, for example, concluded that fairy rings probably were not caused by dancing witches and their familiars, History of Staffordshire (Oxford, 1686), 9–19.
The position he took most forcefully in EM. As early as 1662, in the third edition of his AA, More appropriated Boyle’s experiments for his own purpose, namely to reveal the limitations of the mechanical philosophy and the need for spiritual principles in science. Boyle responded in 1672 in his An Hydrostatical Discourse.. More continued the attack in 1676. See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 207–24. See also the papers by Alan Gabbey, Rupert Hall and John Henry in this volume.
More, Remarks upon Two Late Ingenious Discourses, 53–56.
Ibid. 23.
Ibid.
Boyle, An Hydrostatical Discourse, Preface.
Ibid., 10–11.
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Glanvill, Saducismus, (1681), 2: 11–12.
This is also the position taken by Newton in his final answer to the change of occultism in Query 31 of Opticks (1706 edition).
Sasha Talmor denies that Glanvill was an incurable sceptic in Glanvill Uses and Abuses of Scepticism (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981).
More, Fundamenta Philosophiae in Kabbala denudata, 303, reprinted in Opera 3. Cf. AA, as quoted in Cragg, Cambridge Platonists, 174, 175–6.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Kant and the English Platonists’; Claud Howard, Coleridge’s Idealism..
Popkin, ‘Religious Background of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy’, 4L
‘A scribe attains wisdom through the opportunities of leisure,/ And the man who has little business to do can become wise./ How can the man who holds the plow become wise,/ Who drives oxen, and guides them at their work,/ And whose discourse is with the sons of bulls?/ He sets his mind on turning his furrows,/ And his anxiety is about fodder for heifers./ It is so with every craftsman and builder...’ Ecclesiasticus, 39.
For example Ennead 5.3.9 For the influence of Plotinus on More see the introduction to the Poems, ed. Geoffrey Bullough. On the importance of purification in More’s epistemology, see C.A. Staudenbauer, “Galileo, Ficino and Henry More’s Psychathanasia” See also Robert Crocker’s biographical essay in this volume.
Ward, Life, 65–8.
Glanvill, Some Considerations about Witchcraft, in Saducismus (1682), 1: 10–11.
Ibid., 13, 15. See also in n. 56 below.
Ibid. 165.
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H.G. van Leuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 1630–1690 (The Hague: E.J. Brill, 1963).
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Boyle to Glanvill, 18th Sept. 1677, in Boyle, Works, 6: 58.
More, “True Notion of Spirit” in Saducismus (1681), 2: 155: ‘There is in this Relation [of Florence Newton of Younghall] an eximious example of the magical venom of witches, (whence they are called Veneficae) in that all the mischief this Witch did, was by kissing, or some way touching the party she bewitched, and she confest unless she touched her, she could do her no hurt, which may be called a Magical venom or contagion’.
Conway, The Principles of Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 106.
More was not the only philosopher to be inconsistent on this point. Vitalism and vestiges of occultism are evident in the thought of many of the scientists and philosophers who subscribed to some sort of atomic theory for the very good reason that classical atomism was unable to explain vital phenomena. Gassendi accepted the vitalist notion of the Stoic semina rerum. Boyle also allowed active principles a place in his mechanistic explanation of chemical chain reaction, for example in his explanation of the properties of acids. Newton was never entirely happy with the mechanical philosophy and had to contest the charge that he employed occult forces. Alan Gabbey, “The Mechanical Philosophy and its Problems: Mechanical Explanations, Impene- trability and Perpetual Motion”, in Change and Progress in Modern Science, ed. J.C. Pitt (Dordrecht: D. Reidel), 9–84.
Richard Westfall, “Newton and Alchemy”, in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Betty J. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
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Webster, Witchcraft, 198.
Hoppen lists a number of Hermeticists, Paracelsians and Helmontians among the early members of the Royal Society, art. cit. n. 12 above.
Boyle Works, 6: 631.
Walker, Decline of Hell, 4.
Irving Kirsch, “Demonology and Science during the Scientific Revolution”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1980): 359–68; Stuart Clark, “The Scientific Status of Demonology”, in Vickers, ed., (see n. 58 above), 351–74.
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Coudert, A. (1990). Henry More and Witchcraft. In: Hutton, S. (eds) Henry More (1614–1687) Tercentenary Studies. International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 127. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2267-9_7
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