Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Glanvill

Paranoia, but make it epistemology. Glanvill’s line lands like a trapdoor under the reader’s feet: even if total deception isn’t likely, it’s not unthinkable that the very tools we trust most - our “Faculties” of sense, memory, and reason - might be rigged to mislead us precisely where we feel safest. The elegance is in the conditional softness (“may not be impossible”), a phrase that refuses the comfort of certainty while still sounding politely rational. He doesn’t shout skepticism; he insinuates it, and that insinuation sticks.

The subtext is a pressure test on intellectual vanity. People don’t just want to know things; they want to know that they know. Glanvill aims at that second-order confidence, the swagger that comes with “most certain and assured.” By targeting our strongest convictions rather than our flimsiest impressions, he exposes how certainty can be less a conclusion than a mood, produced by cognitive habit and social reinforcement.

Context matters: writing in the 17th century, Glanvill sits inside a culture mid-transition, where the old authority structures are fraying and the new experimental spirit is still negotiating its rules. Associated with early scientific networks and a defense of “free inquiry,” he uses doubt not as nihilism but as discipline. The sentence quietly argues for methodological humility: if the mind can be “construed” to deceive, then inquiry must be structured to catch its own errors. It’s an invitation to build safeguards - observation, replication, skepticism of the self - against the most persuasive liar in the room: our own certainty.