Science & Tech Quote by Joseph Glanvill

Glanvill swings hellebore like a cudgel: doubt mathematics, and you dont need a counterargument, you need a purge. In the 17th century, hellebore was a notorious "cure" for melancholy and madness. The insult lands because it pretends to be clinical. Skepticism about mathematical certainty isnt treated as an intellectual position but as a symptom, and the remedy is medicinal discipline.

That rhetorical move matters in Glanvills context. England is living through the aftershocks of civil war and the churn of new knowledge: experimental science is rising, old authorities are wobbling, and philosophical skepticism is fashionable enough to feel like a threat. Glanvill, a defender of the Royal Society and a critic of dogmatic certainty in many domains, draws a bright line around mathematics as the one arena where certainty can be clean, demonstrable, and socially stabilizing. He is not merely praising Euclid; he is carving out a safe haven for reason in a culture that fears both credulity and corrosive doubt.

The subtext is political as much as epistemic: if you cant agree that 2+2=4, how can you build trust in any shared method for settling disputes? By pathologizing the doubter, Glanvill also protects the new scientific project from being dragged into the same relativism that threatened theology and governance. It is an early-modern version of a still-familiar move: treat the denial of basic facts not as debate, but as disqualification.