Sir Thomas Browne’s view was, it seems, substantially identical with that of his predecessor, the famous Robert Burton,--no Puritan either!--who has a whole subsection “Of Witches and Magitians, how they cause Melancholy,” asserting that what “they can doe, is as much almost as the Diuell himselfe, who is still ready to satisfie their desires, to oblige them the more vnto him.”[24] Joseph Glanvill, the author of The Vanity of Dogmatizing, was no Puritan,[25] but a skeptical philosopher, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and Chaplain in Ordinary to King Charles II.; neither was his friend, Dr. Henry More, the most celebrated of the Cambridge Platonists. Yet these two scholars and latitudinarians joined forces to produce that extraordinary treatise, Saducismus Triumphatus: or, A Full and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions. This book, an enlarged form of Glanvill’s Philosophical Considerations concerning Witchcraft (1666), was published in 1681, and went through no less than five editions, the last appearing as late as 1726.[26] It was thought to have put the belief in apparitions and witchcraft on an unshakable basis of science and philosophy.[27] No English work on the subject had a more powerful influence. When the Rev. John Hale, of Beverley, wrote his Modest Enquiry,[28] which deplored the Salem excesses and protested against spectral evidence,--a notable treatise, published, with a prefatory epistle from the venerable Higginson,[29] in 1702,--he was able to condense the affirmative part of his argument, because, as he himself says, Glanvill “hath strongly proved the being of Witches.”[30] Dr. Meric Casaubon, Prebend of Canterbury, was not a Puritan; yet the second part of his Credulity and Incredulity (1668) contains a vigorous assertion of demonology and witch-lore, and was republished in 1672 under the alluring title, A Treatise Proving Spirits, Witches and Supernatural Operations by Pregnant Instances and Evidences.[31] Ralph Cudworth, the antagonist of Hobbes, was not a Puritan. Yet in his great Intellectual System he declares for the existence of sorcery, and even admits a distinction between its higher operations--as in the θεουργία [Greek: theourgia] of Apollonius of Tyana[32]--and the vulgar performances of everyday wizards.[33] There is some reason, too, for supposing that Cudworth took part with Henry More in examining certain witches at Cambridge, and heard one of them try to recite the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, as she had offered to do “as an argument she was no witch.”[34]