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From _Skeptic_ vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 34-43.
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SPIRITS, WITCHES, & SCIENCE: WHY THE RISE OF SCIENCE ENCOURAGED BELIEF 
IN THE SUPERNATURAL IN 17TH-CENTURY ENGLAND
By Richard Olson

When Michael Shermer reviewed the second volume of my _Science Deified 
and Science Defied_ for the Summer, 1992 _SKEPTIC_, he began with an 
interesting passage from Robert Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle 
Maintenance_ (1974) which I would like to use as an introduction to this 
essay on the status of beliefs in spirit phenomena and witchcraft during 
the second half of the 17th century. In this passage Pirsig's 
protagonist explains to his son why he does not believe in ghosts (1974, 
pp.38-39):

      They are unscientific. They contain no matter and have no energy 
      and therefore according to the laws of science, do not exist 
      except in people's minds. Of course, the laws of science contain 
      no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist 
      except in people's minds...It's best to refuse to believe in 
      either ghosts or the laws of science.

    The reason this passage jars us into thought is that it applies 
currently accepted criteria for what it means to be an object in the 
world, and uses those to reject the existence of ghosts; then it plays a 
mind game on us by somehow applying the same criteria to statements 
which everyone is presumed to assent to and arguing that if we shouldn't 
believe in ghosts, we shouldn't believe in science either.  
    The usual expectation among American intellectuals--certainly among 
those who view themselves as in the least bit  skeptical--is that anyone 
who believes in "science" will not believe in such creatures of 
superstition as ghosts, spirit phenomena, or "witches."[1] Indeed, the 
first paragraph of the first chapter of the first edition of Garvin 
McCain and Erwin Segal's immensely popular _The Game of Science_, begins 
with the claim that we no longer believe in witches precisely because we 
believe in science:
      Why don't you believe in witches? That question may seem 
      ridiculous  but our ancestors, who were probably as bright as we 
      are, did believe in them, and acted accordingly. Why are we so 
      different and superior? The evidence for or against witches is no 
      better than it was 400 years ago. For us, it is almost impossible 
      to believe in witches; for our ancestors, it was equally difficult 
      to deny their existence. Our new beliefs exist, in part, due to 
      the development of "scientific attitudes" (McCain and Segal, 1969, 
      p.3). 
    Though this statement certainly reflects what most American 
intellectuals believe, there is a strange historical irony contained in 
it and in Pirsig's intentionally perverse argument that if one doesn't 
believe in ghosts, one shouldn't believe in scientific laws either. 
    What I want to argue, is that beliefs in witches, ghosts, and demons 
were heavily under attack and on the wane in England at the very 
beginning of the 17th century before the rise of what we would usually 
identify as modern scientific attitudes. But witchcraft beliefs, and 
beliefs in other spirit phenomena underwent a remarkable revival among 
British intellectuals during the period after the Restoration of James 
II to the throne in 1660; and this revival of demonological beliefs was 
directly and self-consciously attached to the rise of modern scientific 
attitudes among the men who were members of the Royal Society of London. 
So at least for a time it may be true to say that men actually came to 
believe in witches as a result of the development of scientific 
attitudes. In this case, the reverse of Pirsig's argument was taken with 
deadly seriousness by Joseph Glanvill, who argued that if one believed 
in the methods of modern science, one _should_ also believe in ghosts 
and witches. It is probably also true (though here the issue is more 
complicated) that certain arguments in favor of witchcraft made mid-
17th-century intellectuals more favorably disposed to the new science 
than they would otherwise have been and that a general belief in spirit 
phenomena, for which witchcraft stood as a symbol (Schafer, 1969, pp. 
55-85). In order to explain how and why the rise of modern science 
became tied to beliefs in spirit phenomena in mid-17th-century England, 
I think we need to discuss briefly a continental phenomenon at the end 
of the 16th century, and look at the impact it had on early 17th-century 
English religious developments.

Early Criticism of Belief in Demonic Procession

A serious and concerted attack on beliefs in witchcraft and demonic 
possession had been launched at the end of the 16th century in 
connection with a series of spectacular exorcisms that were quite 
literally staged before thousands of witnesses in France between 1566 
and 1599. The goal of the Catholic priests who carried out these 
exorcisms was to promote the reconversion of French protestant Huguenots 
to Catholicism by demonstrating the power of the true Catholic religion; 
and they seem to have had substantial success.
    Understandably, these Catholics' claims were widely challenged by 
Protestant propagandists; but ironically, they were also strongly 
challenged by the French Catholic Crown as well; for during the 1580's 
and 1590's, public exorcisms were stirring up religious passions just at 
a time when the French Crown, through the Edict of Nantes, was trying to 
calm religious hostilities and establish official tolerance for 
Protestantism. As a consequence, in 1598, Henry IV ordered the physician 
Michael Marescot and a group of medical colleagues to investigate the 
popular claims to demonic possession of one Marthe Brosier in the 
expectation that they could establish that her "possession" was either a 
mis-diagnosis of a natural disease such as epilepsy or hysteria, or that 
they could prove it to be a deliberate fraud. Marescot's _Discourse 
veritable sur le faict de Marthe Brosier de Romorantin pretendue 
demoniaque_ appeared in 1599, to be translated immediately into English. 
The overall verdict of Marescot's investigation was stated in a 
memorable line: "Nothing from the devil, much counterfeit, a little from 
disease" (Walker, 1981, p. 35).
    Without totally denying the possibility of demonic possession, 
Marescot and his colleagues were able to establish to their own 
satisfaction, that of the king, and that of many readers, that in one of 
the most celebrated cases of "possession," an initially deluded and 
psychologically unbalanced woman had been exploited by her family and by 
a group of Catholic clergy, for both financial gain and for the 
seditious purpose of stirring up anti-Huguenot sentiment.  In the 
process, Marescot reviewed a series of experimental tests for legitimate 
possession which had become widely accepted by the late 16th century: 
  1)  possessed persons were supposed to be able to understand and speak 
languages of which they had no prior knowledge; 
  2)  possessed persons were supposed to be able to discern secrets and 
predict events of which they could have no natural knowledge-- i.e., 
they had clairvoyance;
  3)  possessed persons had abnormal bodily strength and insensitivity 
to pain; and  
 4)  possessed persons expressed revulsion at holy things, especially 
the reading of scripture or contact with holy water or other blessed 
objects (Walker, p.12).
    Under investigation by Marescot and four other physicians, it was 
shown that Marthe Brosier could understand neither Latin nor Greek, as 
her advocates had claimed; that she had no reaction to holy water that 
was passed off as ordinary water, but that she convulsed when she was 
given plain water that she was told was blessed; that she showed no 
special clairvoyant powers; and that when she was read passages from the 
_Aeneid_, expecting them to be biblical passages, she showed dramatic 
signs of disturbance. Finally, though during her fits Marthe could 
withstand the pain of the "deep pricking of long pins" in her hands and 
neck without showing discomfort, Marescot did find her responsive to 
normal sources of pain when not in convulsions; and he identified her 
reactions in this matter as typical of "melancholic" persons (Walker, 
pp. 34-35, 38).
    Just a few years later, the English physician Edward Jordan, who was 
consulted in two cases of supposed demonic possession, published a 
treatise whose title discloses its major conclusions: _A briefe 
Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother. Written 
upon occasions which hath been of late taken therby, to suspect 
possession of an evil spirit, or some such like supernatural power.  
Wherein it is declared that diverse strange actions and passions of the 
body of man, which in the common opinion are imputed to the Divell, have 
their true natural causes, and do accompany this disease_ (1603). In 
this work Jordan identified almost all of those symptoms that had been 
traditionally identified with demonic possession and witchcraft--
especially insensibility, convulsions, and fits brought on by the 
presence of particular persons or artifacts with symptoms of hysteria. 
Thus, by the early years of the 17th-century there was a substantial 
medical literature which simultaneously denied the existence of 
possession and attacked virtually all of the traditional tests for its 
existence.

Anglicans Attack Demonology To Defend Their Religious Interests

Early 17th-century Anglican attitudes toward demonic possession and 
witchcraft were shaped primarily by the existence of this medical 
literature, in response to the Continental Catholic propaganda, and in 
response to a series of cases in which both an English Jesuit priest, 
William Weston, and a Puritan preacher, John Darrell, claimed to have 
cast demons out of a number of possessed children between 1585 and 1598, 
(Walker, pp. 43-73). Weston's activities were commenced in 1585, but it 
was not until 1602 that a formal inquiry was held regarding his 
exorcisms. Darrell's castings out of devils began in 1596; but in 1598, 
he was tried in London, condemned for fraudulent practices and both 
deposed from the ministry and sent to prison for at least a brief stay 
(Walker, p.64).
    In fact, Darrell's case seems to have been part of a major anti-
Puritan campaign by Archbishop John Whitgift, his Bishop in London, 
Richard Bancroft, and Bancroft's chaplain, Samuel Harsnett. Like the 
French Catholic exorcisms of the late 16th-century, Darrell's 
spectacular success casting out devils was drawing much favorable 
attention for his religion; but Darrell's demonics did most of the 
French examples one better by using their clairvoyance to name witches 
whom Darrell subsequently had arrested (Walker, p. 63). As a popular and 
visible Puritan, Darrell drew Whitgift and Bancroft's serious attention; 
and they apparently decided to discredit him by trying him for fraud. 
According to evidence given by William Sommers, the last of those he had 
dispossessed, Darrell taught several of his demonics how to simulate 
their symptoms, and at least in one case, i.e., that of Sommers, he even 
suggested the fraud to the victim (pp. 62-64). Sommers later recanted 
his evidence and there were apparently any number of irregularities in 
the trial, including a refusal to allow Darrell to speak; so the "trial" 
was continued in a series of publications for the next five years.
    The major Anglican arguments were presented in Harsnett's _A 
Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of John Darrell_ (1599) and in 
John Deacon and John Walker's _Dialogical Discourses of Spirits and 
Devils_ (1601-1602). In _The Trial of Maist Darrell_ (1599), the 
Puritans responded by offering a largely scriptural defense of their 
claim that possession was possible and that it could be eliminated by 
appropriate prayers to God (Walker, pp. 67-68). But they also complained 
about the procedures used in Darrell's trial and they argued (quite 
rightly at the time) that the Anglican prosecutors of Darrell were more 
interested in destroying Puritanism than in eradicating Catholicism, 
otherwise they would have tried Weston the Jesuit. To this claim, 
Whitgift and Bancroft responded by ordering an investigation of Weston's 
claims and Harsnett responded by publishing _A Declaration of Egregious 
Popish Impostors, to withdraw the Harts of Her Majesty's Subjects from 
the Truth of Christian Religion Professed in England, Under the Pretense 
of Casting out Devils Practiced by Edmunds, Alias Weston, a Jesuit_ 
(1603). Circumstances had conspired to give middle-of-the-road Anglican 
apologists an opportunity to simultaneously discredit both the Catholic 
and Puritan opposition by attacking their claims of dispossession. But 
in order to do so, the Anglicans had to act incidentally to undermine 
belief in both demonic possession and in witchcraft by almost completely 
accepting the medical views of Marescot, Jordan, and their colleagues. 
One of their most important converts was James I, who had defended 
beliefs in possession and witchcraft in his famous _Daemonology_ of 
1597, but who had turned into a strong opponent of witch persecution by 
1616 (Shapiro, 1983, p. 199). Technically, neither Harsnett nor Deacon 
and Walker denied the possibility of witchcraft or dispossession, 
although Harsnett probably doubted the existence of either. What they 
did do was offer an explanation of how melancholia and hysteria might 
cause persons to believe in both as well as a demonstration that in many 
cases, men like Weston and Darrell exploited those beliefs and used 
fraudulent techniques to delude people into believing in their power to 
exorcise or to dispossess persons who were possessed. The major concern 
which had held Harsnett and others back from taking an even stronger 
stance against belief in witchcraft and possession at the beginning of 
the 17th century was laid out in the dedication of _The Trial of Mr. 
Darrell_:
      Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into 
      question. Which error is confirmed by denying dispossession and 
      both these errors confirm atheists mightily....If neither 
      possession nor witchcraft (contrary to what has been so long 
      generally and confidently affirmed), why should we think that 
      there are devils? If no devils, no God.  (Walker, pp. 71, 72).
    Puritans thus warned the readers of Anglican tracts that demonology 
and witchcraft were proof against atheistic materialism.

Demonic Power becomes a Natural Phenomenon

In order to protect themselves from the claim that their attacks on 
possession and witchcraft were simultaneously denials of the fallen 
angel and of God, early 17-century Anglican apologists insisted that the 
devil might indeed involve himself in human affairs, but that if he did, 
it must be through the use of natural rather than supernatural powers 
(Shapiro, pp. 200 204). In John Cotta's words:
      Though the divel indeed, as a spirit, may do, and doth many things 
      above and beyond the course of some particular natures: yet doth 
      he not, nor is able to rule or command over general Nature, or 
      infringe or alter her inviolable decrees in the perpetual and 
      never interrupted order of all generations; neither is he 
      generally master of universal Nature, but Nature [is] master and 
      commander of him. For Nature is nothing else but the ordinary 
      power of God in all things created, among which, the divel being a 
      creature, is contained, and therefore subject to that universal 
      power (Clark,  1984, p. 360).
    One critical consequence of the "naturalization" of presumed demonic 
powers was that it brought the study of demonic activities clearly 
within the realm of natural knowledge.  Thus, Francis Bacon argued in 
_De Argumentis Scientarium_ that well established "narratives of 
sorceries, witchcrafts, charms, dreams, divinations, and the like" 
should be included as legitimate data in natural histories in order to 
establish "in which cases and how far effects attributed to superstition 
participate in natural causes" (cited in Clark, p. 355). 
    Even though he remained formally open-minded regarding the existence 
of witches and demons, when Bacon chose to discuss particular issues, 
he, like other Anglicans, explained beliefs in witchcraft as arising out 
of the misinterpretation of natural phenomena. Thus, for example, in the 
_Sylva sylvarum_, he argued that the hallucinogenic effects of some 
ointments produced a mistaken belief in real transvection (human flight) 
and metamorphoses; so that when women charged as witches confessed to 
being transformed into animals and transported to witches sabbaths, they 
were mistakenly reporting their hallucinations as reality.
    For most of the first half of the 17th century, while the twin 
threats of Puritanism and Catholicism seemed more immediate and critical 
to the Anglican cause than philosophically-based atheism, Anglican 
intellectuals continued to express strong skepticism regarding specific 
claims of spirit phenomena and to insist that what had traditionally 
been attributed to supernatural influences was actually accomplished 
through natural ones.  This was particularly true because as Puritanism 
and dissent became ever stronger, popular attempts at witch persecution 
intensified, and established authorities became ever more fearful of the 
religious enthusiasm which underlay them.

Atheism Reverses 
Attitudes About 
Spirit Phenomena

The problem faced by Anglican religious figures changed dramatically 
with the publication of a series of frightening works by Thomas Hobbes. 
Philosophical materialism and atheism had been a minor, though growing, 
problem in early 17th-century England. But the publication of Hobbes's 
_Leviathan_ in 1651, _De Corpore_ in 1655, and _A Physical Dialog, or a 
Conjecture about the Nature of the Air_ in 1661, deflected attention 
from Catholicism and Sectarianism alike, and made Hobbesian Atheism the 
new chief target of moderate Anglican apologetic literature.
     Whether Hobbes was _really_ an atheist is a topic on which scholars  
might differ--though just for the record, I believe he was-- but no one 
can doubt that he was a bitter enemy of what he called priestcraft--or 
the authority of religious persons. Hobbes believed that priests had 
usurped power that rightly belonged to the secular sovereign. In order 
to justify his attacks on priestcraft he turned to a set of arguments 
that had been used by materialist philosophers, such as the atomist, 
Epicuros, in antiquity. According to the ancient materialists and 
Hobbes, priests exploit a natural human fear of the unknown to convince 
people that invisible powers and agents are at work in the world and 
that they (the priests) alone have the power to intercede on people's 
behalf to control these "spirits." "Who," wrote Hobbes, "that is in fear 
of ghosts, will not bear great respect to those who can make the holy 
water that drives them from him"(cited in Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, p. 
96). Similarly, he wrote: "By their demonology, and the use of exorcism, 
and other things appertaining thereto, the priests keep, or think they 
keep, the people in awe of their power and lessen the dependence of 
subjects on the sovereign power of their country."  Since it was the 
false belief in spirits, made possible by ignorance about the causes of 
events, that gave the clergy its power, according to Hobbes, the most 
effective way to fight the power of the clergy was first, to demonstrate 
that spirits, or "incorporeal substances" do not exist; and second, to 
demonstrate that all phenomena can and indeed, must be explicable solely 
in terms of matter in motion.
    To undermine belief in immaterial spirits, Hobbes developed a 
logical argument that depended very heavily on ideas which owe their 
existence to Aristotelian philosophy. The meaning of the term 
_substance_, he argues, is derived from our experiences of physical 
bodies or "corps." The term "incorporeal substance," or "immaterial 
substance" is thus self-contradictory. To accomplish the second part of 
his goal, Hobbes purported to be able to give a completely materialist 
account of all natural philosophy. But in doing so he departed from 
ancient atomism in a way that turns out to play a major role in linking 
witchcraft and the experimental philosophy of the royal society.
    The ancient atomists had posited the existence of atoms and void 
space, claiming that atoms move freely through the void. Descartes, 
however, defined _Matter_ as that which has dimensions; and from this 
definition--which Hobbes accepted--it followed that there can be no 
void; because any space, no matter how small, has dimensions and 
therefore must contain matter. 
    Note here for future reference, Hobbes uses precisely the same kind 
of argument to deny the possibility of spirits and to deny the 
possibility of empty space. The question of whether empty space exists, 
like the question of whether immaterial spirits exist is not to be 
answered empirically. Both questions are to be answered by a purely 
rational analysis of definitions. 
   Hobbes's claim regarding spirits was, quite rightly, seen as an 
attack on almost all fundamental Christian beliefs, for it denied not 
only the existence of demons and witches, but also the immateriality and 
hence the immortality of the human soul. And if this weren't enough, 
Hobbesian Materialism took on an additional troubling aspect during the 
later civil war period when it was adopted by Richard Overton, a 
notorious political radical and one of the founders of the Levellers 
sect.

Joseph Glanvill and the scientific defense of witches

This now brings me to the central events of my story--events connected 
with a moderate Anglican apologist who became both a defender and a 
member of the Royal Society of London in 1662--a man by the name of 
Joseph Glanvill.
    Although Glanvill had a longstanding interest in spirit phenomena 
stemming from his commitment to the Cambridge Platonist doctrine of pre-
existent souls, and though he had begun his investigations into the 
appearances of apparitions as early as 1662, it was not until 1666 that 
he published the first version of his often improved and expanded 
treatise on witchcraft, _Some Philosophical Considerations touching on 
Witches and witchcraft_. A friend, Justice of the Peace Robert Hunt, had 
tried to prosecute a coven of witches during 1664 in Somersetshire; but 
the local gentry were so skeptical that they mocked his efforts. In 
response, Hunt, who knew of Glanvill's interests, sent the depositions 
from the accused witches along with a description of the gentry's repose 
to Glanvill, and Glanvill responded with a refutation of the most common 
reasons for disbelief (Jobe, 1981, pp. 346-347).
    Glanvill begins by explaining what is at stake if the belief in 
witches should be abandoned. Borrowing his theme from the earlier anti-
Anglican defenders of Robert Darrell, he writes: 
      He that thinks there is no _witch_, believes a devil _gratis_, or 
      at least upon inducements which he is likely to find himself 
      disposed to deny when he pleases. And when men are arrived at this 
      degree of dissidence and infidelity, we are beholden to them if 
      they believe either Angel or Spirit, Resurrection of the Body or 
      Immortality of Souls. These things hang together in a chain of 
      _connection_, at least in these men's _hypotheses_; and it is but 
      a happy chance if he that has lost one link, holds another 
      (Glanvill, 1676, p. 2).
 The central doctrines of religion are thus being endangered by those 
who do not believe in witches.
    Secondly, Glanvill immediately seeks to identify the disbelief in 
witches with the Hobbesian attack on experimental philosophy. The 
question of whether witches exist or not, he argues, is a question of 
fact; and as such it can only be settled by appeal to authority or 
sensory evidence.  There are thousands of eye- and ear-witnesses who 
have attested to "things done by persons of despicable power and 
knowledge, beyond the reach of art and ordinary nature," and these 
include not only "vulgar" persons, but "wise and grave discerners...when 
no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common lie." 
Unfortunately, he argues, no amount of empirical evidence could convince 
those who do not believe in witches, "since those that deny the being of 
witches, do it not out of ignorance of these heads of argument...but 
from an apprehension that such a belief is absurd, and the things, 
impossible....Upon these presumptions they condemn all demonstrations of 
this nature, and are hardened against conviction"  (Glanvill, 1676, p. 
3).
    For Glanvill, then, the key issue was whether one placed greater 
confidence in well attested experiences or in metaphysical claims 
regarding the possibility of the existence of certain kinds of entities. 
It is not reasonable, he insists, "first to presume the thing 
impossible, and thence to conclude that the fact cannot be proved: On 
the contrary, we should judge of the action by the evidence, and not the 
evidence by our fancies about the action. This is proudly to exalt our 
own opinions above the clearest testimonies and most sensible 
demonstrations of fact: and so to give the lie to all mankind, rather 
than distrust the conceits of our bold imaginations" (Glanvill, pp. 5-
6).   Given his belief in the limitations of human reason and the 
inability of humans to possess more than probable knowledge of any 
causal account of any phenomenon, Glanvill says that humans have no 
right to insist upon the impossibility of anything.  The most they can 
legitimately claim is that they cannot conceive or imagine how the 
actions in question take place, and this inability to conceive, "only 
argues the weakness and imperfection of our knowledge and apprehensions; 
not the impossibility of those performances" (Glanvill, p. 7).
    Precisely the same kind of argument was being carried on 
simultaneously between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes regarding the 
evacuated space created by Boyle in his air pumps. Hobbes denied that 
the space could be empty because he was committed to a conception of 
space derived from Descartes. According to this conception, matter, or 
body, is defined by extension, so that any extended region must contain 
matter, and a vacuum is literally impossible.  Boyle, whose notion of 
matter and space were derived from atomist notions, was unwilling to 
fight on Hobbesian ground. Whether or not extension could exist without 
a material substance underlying, it was technically an undecidable 
question and therefore beyond the bounds of natural philosophy for 
Boyle. The key question was whether well attested experiments justified 
the claim that the evacuated region was empty of ordinary corpuscles of 
air; and he and his allies were convinced that they did.[2]
   The resolution of the problem of how to decide whether witches exist 
and how to decide whether the receiver of an air pump could be evacuated 
were understood by all parties to the 17th-century debates to be clearly 
linked with one another. No one, least of all Glanvill and Boyle, 
doubted that every reader convinced by Glanvill's arguments about 
witches would also be driven to toward acceptance of Boyle's arguments 
about the phenomena of the air pump, and vice versa.   
    Neither Glanvill and his allies, nor Boyle and his allies, wanted to 
encourage credulity and a lack of critical analysis of experience or 
experiments. To have argued that any individual's factual claims should 
be blindly accepted would have been, in their common view, to play into 
the hand of religious enthusiasts and philosophical charlatans. Instead, 
both sought to encourage "diffidence and backwardness of assent" to any 
such claims and to encourage the careful empirical investigation of all 
(Boyle, 1772, vol.1, pp. ccxx -ccxxii).
    As early as January 19, 1663, Glanvill had begun to investigate 
claims of spirit phenomena when he and a gentleman friend traveled to 
Tedworth in Wilshire, where a "drumming" spirit was said to haunt the 
house of a Mr. Mompesson. The two men first interviewed the servants and 
several neighbors, including two local ministers of impeccable 
reputation, all of whom had been present when the spirit made noises or 
threw objects about the house.  Then they themselves experienced the 
noises that the spirit produced and tried to discover, "if there were 
any trick, contrivance, or common sense of it," but they could find 
nothing; so Glanvill was persuaded that, "the noise was made by some 
_Daemon_ or _Spirit_" (Glanvill, 1689, p. 329). Glanvill delayed 
publication of his account of the "Drummer of Tedworth" at Mr. 
Mompesson's request until the strange phenomena ceased. (He was 
concerned that the spirit would become angered by the books!) In 1668, 
however, it became the first of 28 different detailed accounts of 
spirits and witches which Glanvill published as appendices to his 
philosophical treatments of witchcraft and demons in order to reliably 
establish the evidence for their existence. Summarizing his account of 
the drummer, Glanvill lays out a litany of criteria which such an 
account ought to have in order to be credible support for the belief in 
spirits:
      [The phenomena] are strange enough to prove themselves effects of 
      some _invisible extraordinary Agent_, and so demonstrate that 
      there are spirits, who sometimes sensibly intermeddle in our 
      affairs. And I think they do it with clearness of evidence. For 
      these things were not done long ago or at a far distance, in an 
      ignorant age, or among a barbarous people. They were not seen by 
      two or three only of the Melancholic or superstitious, and 
      reported by those that made them [to] serve the advantage and 
      interest of a party. They were not the passages of a day or night, 
      nor the vanishing glances of an apparition; but these transactions 
      were _near_ and _are public, frequent, and of diverse years 
      continuance_, witnessed by multitudes of competent and unbiased 
      attestors, and acted in a searching and incredulous age: Arguments 
      enough, one would think, to convince any modest and capable reason 
      (Glanvill, 1689, p. 338).
    From the comments of Samuel Pepys, who had found the earlier 
versions of Glanvill's Witchcraft essay "unconvincing," it is fairly 
clear that the accounts of actual spirit events increased the impact of 
his arguments, making them in Pepys' view, "worth reading indeed"  
(Cope, 1956, p. 14). Whatever other impact they had, these "ghost 
stories" certainly made best sellers out of numerous editions of 
Glanvill's _Saducismus Triumphantus_ and stimulated a whole tradition of 
dramatic and fictional treatments of spirit phenomena. 
    In the 1668 _A Blow at Modern Saducism_, which saw the first 
appearance of Glanvill's account of the drummer of Tedworth, Glanvill 
also attempted to recruit the Royal Society to help in investigations of 
spirits and thus in support for the true religion:
      Did the Society direct some of its _wary_ and _luciferous_ 
      enquiries towards the _world of spirits_, believe we should have 
      another kind of _Metaphysics_, than those [that] are taught by men 
      that love to write great volumes and to be _subtle_ about 
      _nothing_? For we know not anything of the world we live in, but 
      by _experiment_ and the _phenomena_; and there is the same way of 
      _speculating immaterial_ nature, by _extraordinary events_ and 
      apparitions, which possibly might be improved to _notices not 
      contemptible_, were there a _cautious_ and _faithful_ history made 
      of those _certain and uncommon appearances_. At least it would be 
      _standing evidence_ against SADDUCISM, to which the present age is 
      so unhappily disposed, and a _sensible argument_ of our 
      _Immortality_ (cited in Prior, 1932, p. 182).
    While the Royal Society offered no official response to Glanvill's 
request, many members contributed directly to Glanvill's collection of 
Spirit relations. Boyle sent a report of an Irish Witch, who he had 
investigated and confirmed his first-hand support of an earlier account 
of a demonic possession at Mascon in France, for example. And John Beale 
sent him letters on the possible effects of witchcraft on butter 
production. Perhaps more importantly, many Royal Society members began 
to incorporate spirits into their laboratory world (Schaffer, 1987, pp. 
55-85).
    It is not clear to me which group benefitted more from the mutually 
supportive arguments of Anglican demonologists and experimental natural 
philosophers after 1666. On the one hand, Glanvill and his Anglican 
colleagues, such as Henry More, reached a far wider audience; and many 
persons who welcomed Glanvill's "defence" of traditional Christian 
beliefs in the immortality of the soul, were probably swayed toward a 
sympathy for experimental philosophy. On the other hand, experimental 
philosophers, as a group, probably had a more profound impact in 
legitimizing Glanvill's views among intellectuals.  In any event, for at 
least a couple of decades after the Restoration, the belief in ghosts 
and witches--which had begun to decline in the late 16th and early 17th 
century --returned as a serious and popular topic for polemical 
discussions; and those who argued in favor of beliefs in spirit 
phenomena simultaneously drew arguments from and promoted experimental 
science (Jobe, 1981, pp. 343-356).

Notes

[1] For purposes of this paper, when I use the term "witch," I use it
as it was defined by Joseph Glanvill in his _Saducismus Trimphatus:
Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions_
(1681), which was probably the most widely read of all English
language demonological treatises: "A witch is one, who can do or seems
to do strange things, beyond the known power of ordinary art and
ordinary nature, by virtue of a confederacy with evil spirits." (p.
269) Though some current scholars argue compellingly that this notion
is a perversion of a vital and viable spiritual tradition, it
nonetheless accurately reflects both the 17th-century perception among
Christian apologists and the meaning presumed by Garvin and McCain
below.

[2] A full account of the conflict between Boyle and Hobbes is given
in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, _Leviathan and the Air Pump:
Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life_ (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985).

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Shapin, Steven, and Shaffer, Simon, 1985.  _Leviathan and the Air Pump: 
   Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life_.  Princeton, Princeton 
   University Press.
Shapiro, Barbara, 1983.  _Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-
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Richard Olson is Professor of History of Science and Willard W. Keith 
Fellow in the Humanities at Harvey Mudd College and Claremont Graduate 
School in Claremont, California.  He studied physics and the history of 
science at Harvard University, from which he received his Ph.D.  His 
special interests include British natural philosophy in the 18th and 
19th centuries, and the relationship among religion, political ideology, 
and scientific activity in Western cultures from antiquity to the 
present.  In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals, his 
publications include _Science as Metaphor_ (1971), _Scottish Philosophy 
and British Physics_ (1975), and two volumes of the magisterial _Science 
Deified and Science Defied_, on the influence of science on Western 
culture.  Professor Olson has just recently completed a path-breaking 
work on the history of the social sciences entitled _The Emergence of 
the Social Sciences, 1642-1792_.

