Of credulity and incredulity, in things natural, civil, and divine.

Wherein, among other things, the sadducism of these times, in denying spirits, witches, and supernatural operations, by pregnant instances, and evidences, is fully confuted: Epicurus his cause, discussed, and the jugling and false dealing, lately used, to bring him, and atheism, into credit, clearly discovered: the use and necessity of ancient learning, against the innovating humour, all along proved, and asserted.
London: Printed for T. Garthwait.. 1668.

"Unadvised belief".

First edition. 8vo. 175x110mm. pp. [16], 316, [4]. Complete with imprimatur and errata leaves. Contemporary calf, boards ruled and decorated in blind. 35mm split to upper joint and some slight cracking. Extremities a little rubbed and internally a little spotted and foxed in places but overall a very good copy. Rare in commerce.
Meric Casaubon (1599-1671) was a theologian, classicist and priest who moved in Royalist and High Anglican circles. Among his early works was a translation of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Of credulity and incredulity is a defence of the existence of witchcraft, demoniac power, magic and the supernatural, a defence first mounted by Casaubon in his 1659 edition of John Dee's Conversations with Spirits. Casaubon's argument, supported by extensive testimony, is that religious faith, dependent as it is on the notion of the spiritual and the otherworldly, has to acknowledge all manifestations of the supernatural, even those, the belief in which might be "unadvised". If one rejects the possibility of the existence of witches and magic, then one might be more tempted to reject the existent of other realms of the apparently incredible.

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