Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Glanvill

Certainty, Glanvill warns, is the feeling that gets us into trouble, not the proof that gets us out. The sentence performs its own argument: it starts with a concession to human confidence ("we are certain of many things"), then calmly pulls the floorboards up from under it. By separating "Certainty" from "absolute Infallibility", he’s attacking a common shortcut in reasoning: the slide from "I’m sure" to "I can’t be wrong". That distinction sounds obvious now, but in the 17th century it was a live cultural fault line, with religion, natural philosophy, and politics all competing to claim final authority.

The subtext is a refusal of intellectual tyranny. Glanvill isn’t just promoting doubt for doubt’s sake; he’s lobbying for a posture of inquiry at a time when dogma could be enforced socially and institutionally. His phrasing - "humane Belief and Inquiry" - matters. He’s carving out a human-scale domain where fallibility isn’t a moral failing but a structural condition. That word "humane" quietly demotes grand metaphysical certainty and elevates method, revisability, and modesty.

Contextually, Glanvill sits near the early Royal Society moment: the rise of experimental science, the hangover of civil war, the breakdown of inherited certainties. The line reads like a bridge between religious skepticism and scientific empiricism: keep your convictions, but don’t confuse them with guarantees. It’s an ethic of epistemic humility designed to keep inquiry alive when certainty wants to end the conversation.