Faith & Spirit Quote by Joseph Glanvill

Glanvill collapses a tidy Enlightenment binary before the Enlightenment even gets going. In one tight chiasmus, he dares the reader to stop treating Reason and Faith as rival teams and notice how each quietly depends on the other. The hook is that he doesn’t ask faith to surrender; he asks reason to admit its own leap.

“The belief of our Reason” is the key tell. Reason, in practice, isn’t a self-running machine that outputs certainty; it’s a set of inferences built on premises we don’t prove every morning. You trust your senses enough to start thinking at all, you trust memory enough to connect yesterday to today, you trust other minds and testimony enough to have a public world. Glanvill calls that trust what it is: faith. Not altar faith, necessarily, but the everyday wager that makes rationality usable.

Then he flips it: “Faith is an Act of Reason.” In the 1660s and 1670s, with experimental science rising (Glanvill was close to the Royal Society’s orbit) and sectarian conflict still hot in the wake of the Civil War, “enthusiasm” was the fear word: private revelation untethered from judgment. Glanvill’s subtext is disciplinary. He’s offering a model of belief that is accountable, proportioned, and evidence-sensitive, not ecstatic. Faith, for him, isn’t the opposite of thinking; it’s thinking pushed into the zones where proof is incomplete but action is required.

The line works because it smuggles a détente into a paradox: if reason needs faith to start, and faith needs reason to stay sane, then the real enemy isn’t doubt but dogmatism pretending it never gambles.