AT the beginning of the year 1565 Cardan had a narrow escape from death by
burning, for his bed from some unknown cause caught fire twice in the same
night while he was asleep. The servant was disturbed by the smoke, and
having aroused his master, told him what was amiss, whereupon Cardan flew
into a violent rage, for he deemed that the youth must be drunk. But he
soon perceived the danger, and then they both set to work to extinguish
the flames. His own description of the occurrence is highly
characteristic. "Having put out the fire, I settled myself again to sleep,
and, while I was dreaming of alarms, and that I was flying from some
danger, it happened that either these terrifying dreams, or the fire and
smoke again aroused me, and, looking around, I found that the bed was once
more alight, and the greater part of it consumed. The vari-coloured
coverlet, the leather hangings, and all the covering of the bed was
unhurt. Thus this great alarm and danger and serious disturbance caused
only a trifling loss; less than half of the bed-linen was burnt, but the
blankets were entirely consumed. On the first alarm the flames burnt out
twice or thrice with little smoke, and caused scarcely any damage. The
second time the fire and the mishap forced me to rise just before dawn,
the fire lasting altogether about seven hours."
There was naturally a warning sign to be found in this accident.[221] The
smoke, Cardan said, denoted disgrace; the fire, peril and fear; the flame,
a grave and pressing danger to his life. The smouldering fire signified
secret plots which were to be put into execution against him by his
servants while he lay in bed. And the fact that he set fire to the bed
himself, denoted that he would be able to meet any coming danger alone and
without assistance. The indictment against him was foreshadowed by the
fire and the flames and the smoke. Poison and assault were not to be
feared. Men might indeed ask questions as to what kind of danger it could
be which only arose from those about him, and fell short of poison and
violence. The fire, he goes on to say, signifies the Magistrate. More than
once it seemed to be extinct, but it always revived. Danger seemed to
threaten him less from open hostility than from the cunning flattery of
foes, and from over-confidence on his own part. His books, which he had
lately caused to be printed, appeared to be in grave peril, but a graver
one overhung his life. He deemed that he would quit the tribunal condemned
by the empty scandal of the crowd, suffering no slight loss, and worsted
chiefly through putting faith in false friends, and through his own
instability. On the whole, the loss would prove inconsiderable; the danger
moderate, but the vexation exceedingly heavy. These results might have
sprung from causes other than natural ones; but, on the other hand, such
things often come about through chance. They might prove to be a warning
to him to keep clear of hostile prejudice, and to make friends of those
in authority, care being taken not to let himself become involved in their
private affairs, and not to seek too close an acquaintance.[222]
Up to this date, Cardan, when he visited his patients, had either walked
or ridden a mule. In 1562 he began to use a carriage, but this change of
habit brought ill luck with it, for, in this same year, his horses ran
away; he was thrown out of the vehicle, and sustained an injury to one of
the fingers of his right hand, and to the right arm as well.[223] The
finger soon healed, but the damage to the right arm shifted itself over to
the left side, leaving the right arm sound. The foregoing details, taken
chiefly from the _Paralipomena_ (Book III. ch. xii.), are somewhat
significant in respect to the serious trouble which came upon him soon
afterwards.
Though he had now secured a class-room for himself, the malice of his
enemies was not yet abated. Just before the end of his term, certain of
them went to Cardinal Morone and told him that it would be inexpedient to
allow Cardan to retain his Professorship any longer, seeing that scarcely
any pupils went to listen to him. The terms Cardan used in describing this
hostile movement against him,[224] rouse a suspicion that there may have
been some ground for the assertion of his adversaries; but he declares
that, at any rate, he had a good many pupils from the beginning of the
session up to the time of Lent. He gives no clue whereby the date of this
intrigue may be exactly ascertained, but it probably happened near the end
of his sojourn at Bologna, because in his account of it he describes
likewise the cessation of his public teaching, and makes no mention of any
resumption of the same. He declares that he was at last overborne by the
multitude of his foes, and their cunning plots. Under the pretence that,
in seeking Cardan's removal, they were really acting for his benefit, they
succeeded in bringing Cardinal Morone round to their views. Cardan's final
words in dealing with this matter help to fix the date of this episode as
some time in 1570. Speaking of his enemies, he writes: "Nay indeed they
have given me greater leisure for the codification of my books, they have
lengthened my days, they have increased my fame, and, by procuring my
removal from the work which was too laborious for me, they secured for me
the pleasure I now enjoy in the discovery and investigation of divers of
the secrets of Nature. Therefore I constantly tell myself that I do not
hate these men, nor deem them blameworthy, because they wrought me an ill
turn, but because of the malignancy they had in their hearts."[225]
It is almost certain that this removal of Cardan from his office of
teacher was part and parcel of a carefully-devised plot against him, and a
prelude to more serious trouble in the near future. Early in April 1570 he
had occasion to put into writing a certain medical opinion which was to be
sent to Cardinal Morone. He describes the episode: "It chanced that one of
the sheets of my manuscript fell from the table down upon the floor, and
then flew by itself up to the cornice of the room, where it hung, fixed to
the woodwork. Greatly amazed, I called for Rodolfo, and pointed out to him
this marvel. He did not indeed see it fly up, and at that time I was
ignorant as to what it might foretell, for I had no foreboding of the many
ills which were about to molest me. But now I see that the meaning of this
portent must have been that, after the approaching shipwreck of my
fortunes, my bark would be sped along with a more favouring breeze. It was
during the month following, unless I am mistaken, that, when I was once
more writing a letter to Cardinal Morone, I looked for a certain
powder-box which had been missing for some long time, and, when I lifted
up a sheet of paper in order to powder it with dust gathered up from the
floor of the room, there was the powder-box, hidden beneath the sheet. How
could it have come there on the level writing-desk? This sign confirmed
the hope I had already conceived of the Cardinal's wisdom and humanity;
that he would plead with the Pope, the best of men, in such wise that I
should find a prosperous end to my toilsome life."[226]
The blow thus foreshadowed fell on October 6, 1570, when he was suddenly
arrested and put under restraint. He speaks of a bond which he gave for
eighteen hundred gold crowns; and says that, while he was in hold, all his
estate was administered by the civil authorities. Rodolfo Sylvestro was
constantly with him during his incarceration, and on January 1, 1571, he
was released, just at nightfall, and allowed to return to his own house.
While he was in prison in the month of October some mysterious knockings
at the door supplied him with a fulfilment and explanation of the
portents lately chronicled. The knockings appeared furthermore to warn him
of approaching death, and he began to bewail his misery; but, having
gathered courage, he heartened himself to face his doom, which could be
nothing worse than death. Young men, leaders of armies, courted death in
battle to win the favour of their sovereigns; wherefore he, a decrepit old
man, might surely await his end with calmness. He then wanders off into a
long disquisition on the philosophy of Polybius, and forgets entirely to
set down further details of his imprisonment, or to explain the cause
thereof.
Pius IV. had died at the end of 1565, and had been succeeded by Michele
Ghislieri, the Cardinal of Alessandria, as Pius V. Like his predecessor,
the new Pope was a Milanese by birth, but in character and aims the two
Popes were entirely different. Pius. V. identified himself completely with
the work of the Holy Office, and straightway set in operation all its
powers for the extirpation of the heretical opinions which, on account of
the easy-going character of the late Pope, had made much progress in
Italy, and nowhere more than in Bologna. Von Ranke, in the _History of the
Popes_, gives an extract (vol. i. p. 97) from the compendium of the
Inquisitors, which sets forth that "Bologna was in a very perilous state,
because there the heretics were especially numerous; amongst them was a
certain Gian Battista Rotto, who enjoyed the friendship and support of
many persons of weight, such as Morone, Pole, and the Marchesa Pescara
(Vittoria Colonna). Rotto made himself very active in collecting money,
which he distributed amongst the poor folk of Bologna who were heretics."
It will be remembered that in 1562, while he was waiting in Milan for the
appointment as Professor at Bologna, Cardan submitted his books to the
Congregation of the Index for approval. He was known to be a
fellow-citizen and friend of the reigning Pope: the _corpus_ of his work
had by that time reached a portentous size, wherefore it is quite possible
that the official readers may have been lenient, or cursory, over their
work; but when Pius V., the strenuous ascetic foe of heresy, stepped into
the place of the indolent Pius IV., jurist and politician rather than
Churchman, it is more than probable that certain amateur inquisitors at
Bologna, fully as anxious to work Cardan's ruin as to safeguard the faith,
may have busied themselves in hunting through his various works for
passages upon which to base a charge of unorthodoxy. Such passages were
not hard to find. There was the horoscope of Jesus Christ, which
subsequently affronted the piety of De Thou. There was the passage already
noticed in which he said such hard things of the Dominicans (_De Varietate
Rerum_, 1557, p. 572). He had indeed disclaimed it, but there it stood
unexpunged in the subsequent editions of the book; and, while considering
this detail, it may be remarked that Pius V. began his career as a member
of the Dominican Order, the practices of which Cardan had impugned. In the
first and second editions of the _De Subtilitate_ was another passage in
which the tenets of Islam and the circumstances of the birth of Christ
were handled in a way which caused grave scandal and offence.[227] This
passage indeed was expunged in the edition of 1560. The _Paralipomena_
were not in print and available, but what can be read in them to-day
doubtless reflects with accuracy the attitude of Cardan's mind towards
religious matters in 1570. Though the _Paralipomena_ were locked in his
desk, it is almost certain that the spirit with which they were inspired
would have infected Cardan's brain, and prompted him to repeat in words
the views on religion and a future state which he had already put on
paper, for he rarely let discretion interfere with the enunciation of any
opinion he favoured. In the _Paralipomena_ are many passages written in
the spirit of universalism, and treating of the divine principle as
something which animates wise men alone, wise men and philosophers of
every age and every clime, Aristotle being the head and chief. Plato and
Socrates and the Seven Sages adorn this illustrious circle, which includes
likewise the philosophers of Chaldea and Egypt. Opinions like these were
no longer the passport to Papal favour or even toleration. The age of the
humanist Popes was past, and the Puritan movement, stimulated into life by
the active competition of the Reformers, was beginning to show its
strength, so that a man who spoke in terms of respect or reverence
concerning Averroes or Plato would put himself in no light peril. Thus for
those of Cardan's enemies who were minded to search and listen it must
have been an easy task to formulate against him a charge of heresy,
specious enough to carry conviction to such a burning zealot as Pius V.
This Pope, in his new regulations for the maintenance of Church
discipline, requisitioned the services of physicians in the detection of
laxity of religious practices, or of unsoundness. "We forbid," he says in
one of his bulls, "every physician, who may be called to the bedside of a
patient, to visit for more than three days, unless he receives an
attestation that the sick man has made fresh confession of his sins."[228]
Cardan, with his irritable temper, may very likely have treated this
regulation as an unwarrantable interference with his profession, and have
paid no attention to it. Again, he evidently followed Hippocrates in
rejecting the supernatural origin of disease; a position greatly in
advance of that held by certain of the leading physiologists of the
time.[229] Thus in more ways than one he may have laid himself open to
some charge of disrespect shown to religion or to the spiritual powers.
The absence of any other specific accusation and the circumstances of his
incarceration, taken in conjunction with the foregoing considerations,
almost compel the conclusion that his arrest and imprisonment in 1570 were
brought about by a charge of impiety whispered by some envious tongue
which will never now be identified. The sanction given by the authorities
of the Church to his writings in 1562, operated without doubt to mitigate
the punishment which fell upon him, and suffered him, after due purgation
of his offences, to enjoy for the residue of his days a life comparatively
quiet and prosperous under the patronage of Pius V.
Though he was let out of prison he was not yet a free man. For some twelve
weeks longer he remained a prisoner in his own house, the bond for
eighteen hundred gold crowns having doubtless been given on this account.
Almost his last reflection about his life at Bologna is one in which he
records his satisfaction that all the men who plotted against him there
met their death soon after their attempt, thus sharing the fate of his
enemies at Milan and Pavia. If he is to be believed in this matter, the
Fates, though they might not shield him from attack, proved themselves to
be diligent and remorseless avengers of his wrongs. At the end of
September he turned his back upon Bologna and the cold hospitality it had
given him, and set forth on his last journey. He travelled by easy stages,
and entered Rome on October 7, 1571, the day upon which Don John of
Austria annihilated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto.
There are evidences in his later writings beyond those already cited, that
Cardan's views on religion had undergone change during his sojourn at
Bologna. It was the custom, even with theologians of the time, to
illustrate freely from the classics, wherefore the spectacle of the names
of the great men of Greek and Roman letters, scattered thickly about the
pages of any book, would not prove or even suggest unorthodoxy. Cardan
quotes Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus twenty times for any saint in the
Calendar. He does not mention the Virgin more than once or twice in the
whole of the _De Vita Propria_; and, in discoursing on the immortality of
the soul, he cites the opinion of Avicenna, but makes no mention of either
saint or father.[230] The world of classic thought was immeasurably nearer
and more real to Cardan than it can be to any modern dweller beyond the
Alps: to him there had been no solution of continuity between classic
times and his own. When he sat down to write in the _Theonoston_ his
meditations on the death of his son, in the vain hope of reaping
consolation therefrom, he invoked the golden rule of Plotinus, which lays
down that the future is foreseen and arranged by the gods. Being thus
arranged, it must needs be just, for God is the highest expression of
justice. Against a fate thus settled for us we have no right to complain,
lest we should seem to be setting ourselves into opposition to God's will.
Here, although he writes in the spirit of a Christian, the authority cited
is that of a heathen philosopher, and the form of his meditations is taken
rather from Seneca than from father or schoolman. The devotional bias of
Cardan's nature seems to have been strengthened temporarily by the
terrible experiences of Gian Battista's trial and death; but in the course
of his residence at Bologna a marked reaction set in, and the fervent
religious outburst, in which he sought consolation during his intolerable
sorrow, was succeeded by a calmer mood which regarded the necessary evils
of life as transitory accidents, and death as the one and certain end of
sorrow, and perhaps of consciousness as well. What he wrote during his
residence in Rome he kept in manuscript; his recent experience at Bologna
warned him that, living under the shadow of the Vatican with Pius V. as
the ruler thereof, it behoved him to walk as an obedient son of the
Church.
Cardan went first to live in the Piazza di San Girolamo, not far from the
Porto del Popolo, but subsequently he lived in a house in the Via Giulia
near the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato, where probably he died. He
had not long been settled in Rome before he was able to add a fresh
supernatural experience to his already overburdened list. In the month of
August 1572 he was lying awake one night with a lamp burning, when
suddenly he heard a loud noise to the right of the chamber, as if a cart
laden with planks was being unloaded. He looked up, and, the door being
open at the time, he perceived a peasant entering the room. Just as he
was on the threshold the intruder uttered the words, "_Te sin casa_," and
straightway vanished. This apparition puzzled him greatly, and he alludes
to it again in chapter xlvii. of the _De Vita Propria_. Ultimately he
dismisses it with the remark that the explanation of such phenomena is
rather the duty of theologians than of philosophers.
With regard to matters of religious belief he seems to have taken as a
rule of conduct the remark above written, and left them to the care of
professional experts, for very few of his recorded opinions throw any
light upon his views of the dogmas and doctrines of the Church. Whatever
the tenor of these opinions may have been, he never proclaimed them
definitely. Probably they interested him little, for he was not the man to
keep silent over a subject which he had greatly at heart. He gave a
general assent to the teaching of the Church, taking up the mental
attitude of the vast majority of the learned men of his time, and expected
that the Church would do all that was necessary for him in its own
particular province. If he regarded Erasmus and Luther as disturbers of
the faith and heretics, he did not say so, nor did he censure their
activity. (Erasmus he praises highly in the opening words of the horoscope
which he drew for him.--_Gen. Ex.,_ p. 496.) But he had certainly no
desire to emulate them or give them his support. The world of letters and
science was wide enough even for his active spirit; the world lying behind
the veil he left to the exploration of those inquirers who might have a
taste for such a venture. Still every page of his life's record shows how
strong was his bent towards the supernatural; but the phase of the
supernatural which he chose for study was one which Churchmen, as a rule,
had let alone. Spirits wandering about this world were of greater moment
to him than spirits fixed in beatitude or bane in the next; and
accordingly, whenever he finds an opportunity, he discourses of
apparitions, lamiæ, incubi, succubi, malignant and beneficent genii, and
the methods of invoking them. Now that old age was pressing heavily upon
him and he began to yearn for support, he sought consolation not in the
ecstatic vision of the fervent Catholic, but in fostering the belief that
he was in sooth under the protection of some guardian spirit like that
which had attended his father and divers of the sages of old. Although he
had in his earlier days treated his father's belief with a certain degree
of respect and credence,[231] there is no evidence that he was possessed
with the notion that any such supernatural guardian attended his own
footsteps at the time when he put together the _De Varietate_; indeed it
would seem that his belief was exactly the opposite. He writes as follows:
"It is first of all necessary to know that there is one God, the Author of
all good, by whose power all things were made, and in whose name all good
things are brought to pass; also, that if a man shall err he need not be
guilty of sin. That there is no other to whom we owe anything or whom we
are bound to worship or serve. If we keep these sayings with a pure mind
we shall be kept pure ourselves and free from sin. What a demon may be I
know not, these beings I neither recognize nor love. I worship one God,
and Him alone I serve. And in truth these things ought not to be published
in the hearing of unlearned folk; for, if once this belief in spirits be
taken up, it may easily come to pass that they who apply themselves to
such arts will attribute God's work to the devil."[232] And in another
place: "I of a truth know of no spirit or genius which attends me; but
should one come to me, after being warned of the same in dreams, if it
should be given to me by God, I will still reverence God alone; to Him
alone will I give thanks, for any benefit which may befall me, as the
bountiful source and principle of all good. And, in sooth, the spirit may
rest untroubled if I repay my debt to our common Master. I know full well
that He has given to me, for my good genius, reason, patience in trouble,
a good disposition, a disregard of money and dignities, which gifts I use
to the full, and deem them better and greater possessions than the Demon
of Socrates."[233]
About the Demon of Socrates Cardan has much to say in the _De Varietate_.
He never even hints a doubt as to the veracity and sincerity of Socrates.
He is quite sure that Socrates was fully persuaded of the reality of his
attendant genius, and favours the view that this belief may have been well
founded. He takes an agnostic position,[234] confining his positive
statement to an assertion of his own inability to realize the presence of
any ghostly minister attendant upon himself. In the _De Subtilitate_ he
tells an experience of his own by way of suggesting that some of the
demons spoken of by the retailers of marvels might be figments of the
brain. In 1550 Cardan was called in to see a certain woman who had long
been troubled with an obscure disease of the bladder. Every known remedy
was tried in vain, when one day a certain Josephus Niger,[235] a
distinguished Greek scholar, went to see the patient. Niger, according to
Cardan's account, was quite ignorant of medicine, but he was reputed to be
a skilled master of magic arts. The woman had a son, a boy about ten years
old, and Josephus having handed him a three-cornered crystal, which he had
with him, bade the youth secretly to look into it, and then declare, in
his mother's hearing, that he could see in the crystal three very terrible
demons going on foot. Then, after Josephus had whispered certain other
words in the boy's ear, the boy went on to say that he beheld another
demon, vastly bigger than the first, riding on horseback and bearing in
his hand a three-tined fork. This monster overthrew the other demons, and
led them away captive, bound with chains to his saddlebow. After listening
to these words the woman rapidly got well, and Cardan, in commenting on
the event, declares that she must have been cured either by the agency of
the demons or by the force of the imagination, inasmuch as it would be
difficult, if not impossible, to invent any other reason of her
recovery.[236] In another passage of the _De Subtilitate_ he displays
judicious reserve in writing of Demons in general.[237]
During those terrible days, when his son had just died a felon's death,
and when he himself was haunted by the real dangers which beset him, and
almost maddened by the signs and tokens which seemed to tell of others to
come, the belief which Fazio his father had nourished easily found a
lodgment in his shaken and bewildered brain. In the _Dialogus de Humanis
Consiliis_, one of the speakers tells of a certain man who is clearly
meant to be Cardan himself. The speaker goes on to say that he is sure
this man is attended by a genius, which manifested itself to him somewhat
late in his life. "Aforetime, indeed, it had been wont to convey to him
warnings in dreams and by certain noises. What greater proof of his power
could there be than the cure of this man, without the use of drugs, of an
intestinal rupture on the right side? If indeed it had not fared with him
thus, after his son's death, he would at once have passed out of this
life, whereby many and great evils might have come to pass. He was freed
also from another troublesome ailment. In sooth, so many and so mighty are
the wonderful things which had befallen him, that I, who am very intimate
with him (and he himself thinks the same), am constrained to believe that
he is attended by a genius, great and powerful and rare, and that he is
not the master of his own actions. What he would have, he has not; and
what he has, he would not have chosen, or even wished for. This thing
causes him much trouble, but he submits when he reflects that all things
are God's handiwork." The speaker ends by saying that he never heard of
any others thus attended, save this man, and his father before him, and
Socrates.[238]
But it is in chapter xlvii. of the _De Vita Propria_, which must have been
written shortly before his death, that he lets the reader see most plainly
how strong was the hold which this belief in a guardian spirit of his own
had taken upon him. "It is an admitted truth," he writes, "that attendant
spirits have protected certain men, to wit, Socrates, Plotinus, Synesius,
Dion, Flavius Josephus, and myself. All of these have enjoyed prosperous
lives except Socrates and me, and I, as I have said before, was at one
time offered many and favourable opportunities for the achievement of
happiness. But C. Cæsar the dictator, Cicero, Antony, Brutus, and Cassius
were also attended by mighty spirits, albeit malignant. For a long time I
have been persuaded that I too had one, but by what method it gave me
intelligence as to events about to happen, I could not exactly ascertain
until I reached the seventy-fourth year of my age, the season when I began
to write this record of my life. I now perceive that when I was in Milan
in 1557, when my genius perceived what was hanging over me--how that my
son on that same evening had promised to marry Brandonia Seroni, and that
he would complete the nuptials the following day--it produced in me that
palpitation of the heart of which I have already made mention, a weakness
known to my genius alone, a manifestation which served to simulate a
trembling of the bed."
Cardan writes at length to show that the mysterious knocking which he and
Rodolfo Sylvestro had heard during his imprisonment at Bologna, the
peasant who entered his bed-chamber saying "_Te sin casa_," and divers
other manifestations, going back as far as 1531--croaking of ravens,
barking of dogs, and the ignition of fire-wood--must all have been brought
about by the working of this powerful spirit. In 1570 there happened to
him one of his everyday experiences of the presence of supernatural
powers. In the middle of the night he was conscious of some presence
walking about the room. It sat down beside him, and at the same time a
loud noise arose from a chest which stood near. This phenomenon, he
admits, might well have been the figment of a brain overburdened with
thought; but suddenly his memory flies back to an experience of his
twentieth year, upon which he proceeds to build a story, wild and fanciful
even for his powers of imagination. "What man was it," he asks, "who sold
me that copy of Apuleius when I was in my twentieth year, and forthwith
went away? I indeed, at that time, had made only one essay in the literary
arena, and had no knowledge of the Latin tongue; but in spite of this, and
because the book had a gilded cover, I was imprudent enough to buy it. The
very next day I found myself just as well versed in Latin as I am now.
Moreover, almost at the same time I acquired knowledge of Greek and
Spanish and French, sufficient for reading books written in these
languages."
Cardan was by this time completely possessed by the belief in his
attendant genius, and the flash of memory which recalled the purchase of
some book or other in his youth, suggested likewise the attribution of
certain mystic powers to this guardian genius, and conjured up some
fanciful explanation as to the way these powers had been exercised upon
himself; he, the person most closely concerned, being entirely unconscious
of their operation at the time when they first affected him. This recorded
belief in a gift of tongues is one of the most convincing bits of evidence
to be gleaned from Cardan's writings of the insanity which undoubtedly
afflicted him, at least periodically, at this crisis of his life.
FOOTNOTES:
[221] He mentions this matter briefly in the _De Vita Propria_: "Bis
arsisset lectus, prædixi me non permansurum Bononiæ, et prima vice
restiti, secunda non potui."--ch. xli. p. 151. A fuller account of it is
in _Opera_, tom. x. p. 464.
[222] _Opera_, tom. x. p. 464.
[223] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxx. p. 80. He seems to have had many
untoward experiences in driving. He tells of another mishap (_Opera_, tom.
i. p. 472) in June 1570; how a fellow, some tipstaff of the courts, jumped
into his carriage and frightened the mares Cardan was driving, jeering at
them likewise because they were rather bare of flesh.
[224] "Demum sub conductionis fine, voces sparserunt, et maxime apud
Moronum Cardinalem, me exiguo auditorio profiteri, quod quanquam non
omnino verum esset, quinimo ab initio Academiæ multos, et usque ad dies
jejunii haberem auditores."--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xvii. p. 56.
[225] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xvii. p. 57.
[226] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xliii. p. 163.
[227] "Alii multis diebus abstinent cibo, alii igne uruntur, ac ferro
secantur, nullum doloris vestigium preferentes; multi sunt vocem e pectore
mittentes, qui olim engastrimuthi dicebantur; hoc autem maxime eis
contingit cum orgia quædam exercent, atque circumferuntur in orbem. Quæ
tria ut verissima sunt et naturali ratione mira tamen constant, cujus
superius mentionem fecimus, ita illud confictum nasci pueros e mulieribus
absque concubitu."--_De Subtilitate_, p. 353.
[228] Ranke, _History of the Popes_, vol. i. p. 246.
[229] Mr. Stephen Paget in his life of Ambroise Paré, the great
contemporary French surgeon, gives an interesting account of Paré's
beliefs on the divine cause of the plague, p. 269.
[230] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxii. p. 63.
[231] "Multa de dæmonibus narrabat, quæ quam vera essent nescio."--_De
Utilitate_, p. 348.
[232] _De Varietate_, p. 351.
[233] _Ibid.,_ p. 658.
[234] In his counsel to his children, he writes: "Do not believe that you
hear demons speak to you, or that you behold the dead. Seek not to learn
the truth of these things, for they are amongst the things which are
hidden from us."
[235] Cardan alludes to Niger in _De Varietate_, p. 641: "Referebat
aliquando Josephus Niger harum rerum maximé peritus, dæmonem pueris se sub
forma Christi ostendisse, petiisseque ut adoraretur."
[236] _De Subtilitate_, p. 530.
[237] "Nolim ego ad trutinam hæc sectari, velut Porphyrius, Psellus,
Plotinus, Proclus, Jamblicus, qui copiose de his quæ non videre, velut
historiam natæ rei scripserunt."--_De Subtilitate_, p. 540.
[238] _Opera_, tom. i. 672.