To appreciate this point, let us go back to Glanvill circa 1661. He had just published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, which pleaded for religious tolerance over persecution and freedom of thought over scholasticism. In the treatise, he questions how we can be dogmatic about religion (and the immaterial world) when we have such deep uncertainty about sc

To ignore this, to evade it, to attempt to see things as submissive to some kind of intellectualisation, some sort of plan, to attempt to draw up a set of rules, or a set of laws, or a formula, is a form of self-indulgence, and in the end suicidal stupidity.