Joseph Glanvill is significant both as a popularizer of the ideas of the Cambridge Platonists and the Restoration natural philosophers, and as a philosophical thinker who prefigured David Hume's doctrine of causation. He was also an important and prolific apologist for the Restoration-era Church of England, and a leader in the development of plain prose. In the disputatious intellectual world of the Restoration, Glanvill was a particularly tireless controversialist: most of his written work either provoked or responded to dispute.

Glanvill was born in 1636 in Plymouth, England, the third son of the Puritan merchant Nicholas Glanville (Joseph Glanvill later dropped the terminal e from his name) and his wife Joan. He matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1652 and left Exeter with a B.A. in 1655, going up to Lincoln College in 1655. Both of these Oxford colleges were dominated by Puritans during the Interregnum--the period in English history between...