THE estimates hitherto made concerning Cardan's character appear to have
been influenced too completely, one way or the other, by the judgment
pronounced upon him by Gabriel Naudé, and prefixed to all editions of the
_De Vita Propria_. Some writers have been disposed to treat Naudé as a
hide-bound pedant, insensible to the charm of genius, and the last man who
ought to be trusted as the valuator of a nature so richly gifted,
original, and erratic as was Cardan's. Such critics are content to regard
as black anything which Naudé calls white and _vice versâ_. Others accept
him as a witness entirely trustworthy, and adopt as a true description of
Cardan the paragraphs made up of uncomplimentary adjectives--applied by
Cardan to himself--which Naudé has transferred from the _De Vita Propria_
and the _Geniturarum Exempla_ to his _Judicium de Cardano_.
It may be conceded at once that the impression received from a perusal of
this criticism is in the main an unfavourable one of Cardan as a man,
although Naudé shows himself no niggard of praise when he deals with
Cardan's achievements in Medicine and Mathematics. But in appraising the
qualifications of Naudé to act as a judge in this case, it will be
necessary to bear in mind the fact that he was in his day a leading
exponent of liberal opinions, the author of a treatise exposing the
mummeries and sham mysteries of the Rosicrucians, and of an "Apologie pour
les Grands Hommes soupçonnez de Magie," and a disbeliever in supernatural
manifestations of every kind. With a mind thus attuned it is no matter of
surprise that Naudé should have been led to speak somewhat severely when
called upon to give judgment on a man saturated as Cardan was with the
belief in sorcery, witches, and attendant demons.
If Naudé indeed set to work with the intention of drawing a figure of
Cardan which should stand out a sinister apparition in the eyes of
posterity, his task was an easy one. All he had to do was to place Jerome
Cardan himself in the witness-box. Reference to the passages already
quoted will show that, in the whole _corpus_ of autobiographic literature,
there does not exist a volume in which the work of self-dissection has
been so ruthlessly and completely undertaken and executed as in Cardan's
memoirs. It has all the vices of an old man's book; it is garrulous,
vain-glorious, and full of needless repetition; but, whatever portion of
his life may be under consideration, the author never shrinks from holding
up to the world's gaze the result of his searches in the deepest abysses
of his conscience. Autobiographers, as a rule, do not feel themselves
subject to a responsibility so deep as this. Memory turns back to the
contemplation of certain springs of action, certain achievements in the
past, making a judicious selection from these, and excerpting only such as
promise to furnish the possible reader with a pleasing impression of the
personality of the subject. With material of this sort at hand, the
autobiographer sets to work to construct a fair and gracious monument,
being easily persuaded that it would be a barbarous act to mar its
symmetry by the introduction of loathly and misshapen blocks like those
which Cardan, had he been the artist, would have chosen first of all.
Naudé, after he has recorded the fact that, from his first essay in
letters, he had been a zealous and appreciative student of Cardan's works,
sets down Cardan's picture of himself, taken from his own Horoscope in the
_Geniturarum Exempla_, "nugacem, religionis contemptorem, injuriæ illatæ
memorem, invidum, tristem, insidiatorem, proditorem, magum, incantatorem,
frequentibus calamitatibus obnoxium, suorum osor[e=], turpi libidini
deditum, solitarium, inamoenum, austerum, spontè etiam divinantem,
zelotypum, lascivum, obscoenum, maledicum, obsequiosum, senum
conversatione se delectantem, varium, ancipitem, impur[u=], et dolis
mulierum obnoxium, calumniatorem, et omnino incognitum propter naturæ et
morum repugnantiam, etiam his cum quibus assidue versor." The critic at
once goes on to state that in his opinion this description, drawn by the
person who ought to know best, is, in the main, a correct one. What better
account could you expect, he asks, of a man who put faith in dreams and
portents and auguries; who believed fully in the utterances of crazy
beldames, who saw ghosts, and who believed he was attended by a familiar
demon? Then follows a catalogue of moral offences and defects of
character, all taken from Cardan's own confessions, and a pronunciation by
Naudé that the man who says he never lies, must be of all liars the
greatest; the charge of mendacity being driven home by references to
Cardan's alleged miraculous comprehension of the classic tongues in a
single night, and his pretended knowledge of a cure for phthisis. There is
no need to follow Naudé farther in his diatribe against the faults and
imperfections, real and apparent, of Cardan's character; these must be
visible enough to the most cursory student. Passages like these arouse
the suspicion that Naudé knew books better than men, that at any rate he
did not realize that men are to be found, and not seldom, who take
pleasure in magnifying their foibles into gigantic follies, and their
peccadilloes into atrocious crimes; while the rarity is to come across one
who will set down these details with the circumstantiality used by Cardan.
There is one defect in the _De Vita Propria_--an artistic one--which Naudé
does not notice, namely, that in his narrative of his early days Cardan
often over-reaches himself. His show of extreme accuracy destroys the
perspective of the story, and, in his anxiety to be minute over the
sequence of his childish ailments, the most trivial details of his uneasy
dreams, and the cuffs he got from his father and his Aunt Margaret, he
confuses the reader with multitudinous particulars and ceases to be
dramatic. But the hallucinations which he nourished about himself were not
all the outcome of senility. In the _De Varietate_, the work upon which he
spent the greatest care, and the product moreover of his golden prime, he
gives an account of four marvellous properties with which he was
gifted.[248] The first of these was the power to pass, whenever the whim
seized him, from sense into a kind of ecstasy. While he was in this state
he could hear but faintly the sound of voices, and could not distinguish
spoken words. Whether he would be sensitive to any great pain he could not
say, but twitchings and the sharpest attacks of gout affected him not.
When he fell into this state he felt a certain separation about the heart,
as if his soul were departing from that region and taking possession of
his whole body, a door being opened for the passage of the same. The
sensation would begin in the cerebellum, and thence would be diffused
along the spine. The one thing of which he was fully conscious, was that
he had passed out of himself. The second property was that, when he would,
he could conjure up any images he liked before his eyes, real [Greek:
eidôla], and not at all to be compared with the blurred processions of
phantoms which he was wont to see when he was a child. At the time when he
wrote, perhaps by reason of his busy life, he no longer saw them
whensoever he would, nor so perfectly expressed, nor for so long at a
time. These images constantly gave place one to another, and he would
behold groves, and animals, and orbs, and whatever he was fain to see.
This property he attributed to the force of his imaginative power, and his
clearness of vision. The third property was that he never failed to be
warned in dreams of things about to happen to him; and the fourth was that
premonitory signs of coming events would display themselves in the form of
spots on his nails. The signs of evil were black or livid, and appeared on
the middle finger; white spots on the same nail portending good fortune.
Honours were indicated on the thumb, riches on the fore-finger, matters
relating to his studies and of grave import on the third finger, and minor
affairs on the little finger.
In putting together the record of his life, Cardan eschewed the narrative
form and followed a method of his own. He collected the details of his
qualities, habits, and adventures in separate chapters; his birth and
lineage, his physical stature, his diet, his rule of life, his
imperfections, his poverty, the misfortunes of his sons, his masters and
pupils, his travels, his experiences of things beyond nature, his cures,
the persecutions of his foes, and divers other categories being grouped
together to make up the _De Vita Propria_, which, though it is the most
interesting book he has left behind him, is certainly the most clumsy and
chaotic from a literary point of view. The chapters for the most part
begin with his early years, and end with some detail as to his life in
Rome, each one being a categorical survey of a certain side of his life;
but remarks as to his personal peculiarities are scattered about from
beginning to end. He tells how he could always see the moon in broad
daylight;[249] of his passion for wandering about the city by night
carrying arms forbidden by the law; of his practice of self-torture,
beating his legs with a switch, twisting his fingers, pinching his flesh,
and biting his left arm; and of going about within doors with naked legs;
how at one time he was possessed with the desire, _heroica passio_, of
suicide; of his habit of filling his house with pets of all sorts--kids,
lambs, hares, rabbits, and storks. The chapter in which he records all the
maladies which afflicted him, puts upon the reader's credulity a burden
almost as heavy as is the catalogue given by another philosopher of the
number of authors he mastered before his twelfth year. Two attacks of the
plague, agues, tertian and quotidian, malignant ulcers, hernia,
hæmorrhoids, varicose veins, palpitation of the heart, gout, indigestion,
the itch, and foulness of skin. Relief in the second attack of plague came
from a sweat so copious that it soaked the bed and ran in streams down to
the floor; and, in a case of continuous fever, from voiding a hundred and
twenty ounces of urine. As a boy he was a sleep-walker, and he never
became warm below the knees till he had been in bed six hours, a
circumstance which led his mother to predict that his time on earth would
be brief.
Cardan lived an abstemious life. He broke his fast on bread-and-water and
a few grapes. He sometimes dined off bread, the yolk of an egg, and a
little wine, and would take for supper a mess of beetroot and rice and a
chicory salad. The catalogue of his favourite dishes seems to exhaust
every known edible, and it will suffice to remark that he was specially
inclined to sound and well-stewed wild boar, the wings of young cockerels
and the livers of pullets, oysters, mussels, fresh-water crayfish because
his mother ate greedily thereof when she was pregnant with him; but of all
dishes he rates the best a carp from three pounds weight to seven, taken
from a good feeding-ground. He praises all sweet fruit, oil, olives, and
finds in rue an antidote to poison. Ten o'clock was his hour for going to
bed, and he allowed himself eight hours' sleep. When wakeful he would walk
about the room and repeat the multiplication table. As a further remedy
for sleeplessness he would reduce his food by half, and would anoint his
thighs, the soles of his feet, the neck, the elbows, the carpal bones, the
temples, the jugulars, the region of the heart and of the liver, and the
upper lip with ointment of poplars, or the fat of bear, or the oil of
water-lilies.
These few extracts will show that an intelligible narrative could scarcely
be produced by the methods Cardan used. The book is a collection of facts,
classified as a scientific writer would arrange the sections and
subsections of his subject. In gathering together and grouping the leading
points of his life, a method somewhat similar to his own will suffice, but
there will be no need to descend to a subdivision so minute as his own. A
task of this sort is never an easy one, and in this instance the
difficulties are increased by the diffuse and complicated nature of the
subject matter; and because, owing to Cardan's wayward mental habit,
there is no saying in what corner of the ten large folios which contain
his writings some pregnant and characteristic sentence, picturing
effectively some aspect of his nature or perhaps exhibiting the man at a
glance, may not be hidden away.
It must not be inferred, because Cardan himself and his critics after him,
have laid such great stress upon his vices and imperfections, that he was
devoid of virtues. The most striking and remarkable of his merits was his
industry, but even in this particular instance, where his excellence is
most clearly manifest, he is constantly lamenting his waste of time and
idleness. Again and again he mourns over the precious hours he has spent
over chess and dice and games of chance. In his counsels to his children,
he compares a gambler to a sink of all the vices, and in writing of his
early life at Sacco he describes himself as an idle profligate, and tells
how he entirely neglected his profession. If indeed such monstrous cantles
were cut out of his time through idleness he must, though his life proved
a long one, have possessed extraordinary power of rapid production; for
the huge mass of his published work, without taking any account of the
many manuscripts he burned from time to time, would, in the case of most
men, represent the ceaseless labour of a long life. And the _corpus_ is
not great by reason of haste or want of finish. He has recorded more than
once how it was ever his habit to let his work be polished to the utmost
before putting it in type. The citations with which his pages bristle
proclaim him to be a reader almost as voracious and catholic as Burton;
and Naudé, with the watchfulness of the hostile critic in his heart and
the bookworm's knowledge in his brain, would have been ready and able to
convict him of quoting authors he had not read, if the least handle for
this charge should have been given, but no accusation of the kind is
preferred. The story of his life shows him to be full of rough candour and
honesty, and unlikely to descend to subterfuge, while his great love of
reading and his accurate retentive memory would make easy for him a task
which ordinary mortals might well regard as hopeless.
Those critics who pass judgment on Cardan, taken solely as a Physician or
as a Mathematician, will give a presentment more fallacious than imperfect
generalizations usually furnish, for in Cardan's case the man, taken as a
whole, was incomparably greater than the sum of his parts. Naudé remarks
that a man who knows a little of everything, and that little imperfectly,
deserves small respect as a citizen of the republic of letters, but Cardan
did not belong to this category, as Julius Cæsar Scaliger found to his
cost. He was not like the bookmen of the revival of learning--Poliziano,
Valla, or Alberti may stand as examples--who after putting on the armour
of the learned language and saturating themselves with the _literæ
humaniores_, made excursions into some domain of science for the sake of
recreation. Cardan might rather be compared with Varro or Theophrastus in
classic, and with Erasmus, Pico, Grotius, or Casaubon in modern times. On
this point Naudé indulges in something approaching panegyric. He
writes--"Investigation will show us that many excelled him in the
humanities or in Theology, some even in Mathematics, some in Medicine and
in the knowledge of Philosophy, some in Oriental tongues and in either
side of Jurisprudence, but where shall we find any one who had mastered so
many sciences by himself, who had plumbed so deeply the abysses of
learning and had written such ample commentaries on the subjects he
studied? Assuredly in Philosophy, in Metaphysics, in History, in Politics,
in Morals, as well as in the more abstruse fields of learning, nothing
that was worth consideration escaped his notice."
The foregoing eulogy from the pen of an adverse critic gives eloquent
testimony to Cardan's industry and the catholicity of his knowledge. As to
his industry, the record of his literary production, chronicled
incidentally in the course of the preceding pages, will be evidence
enough, seeing that, from the time when he "commenced author," scarcely a
year went by when he did not print a volume of some sort or other; to say
nothing of the production of those multitudinous unpublished MSS., of
which some went to build up the pile he burnt in his latter years in Rome,
while others, perhaps, are still mouldering in the presses of university
or city libraries of Italy. Frequent reference has been made to the more
noteworthy of his works. Books like the _De Vita Propria_, the _De Libris
Propriis_, the _De Utilitate ex Adversis Capienda_, the _Geniturarum
Exempla_, the _Theonoston_, the _Consilia Medica_, the dialogues _Tetim_
and _De Morte_, have necessarily been drawn upon for biographical facts.
The _De Subtilitate_ and the _De Varietate Rerum_; the _Liber Artis
Magnæ_, the _Practica Arithmeticæ_, have been noticed as the most enduring
portions of his legacy to posterity; wherefore, before saying the final
word as to his literary achievement, it may not be superfluous to give a
brief glance at those of his books which, although of minor importance to
those already cited, engaged considerable attention in the lifetime of the
writer.
The work upon which Cardan founded his chief hope of immortality was his
_Commentary on Hippocrates_. In bulk it ranks first easily, filling as it
does one of the large folios of the edition of 1663. Curiously enough, in
addition to a permanent place in the annals of medicine, Cardan
anticipated for this forgotten mass of type a general and immediate
popularity; wider than any which his technical works could possibly enjoy,
seeing that it dealt with the preservation of health, the greatest mortal
blessing, and must on this account be of interest to all men. It will be
enough to remark of these commentaries that no portion of Cardan's work
yields less information as to the author's life and personality; to dilate
upon them, ever so superficially, from a scientific point of view, would
be waste of time and paper. Another of his works, which he rated highly,
was his treatise on Music. It was begun during his tenure of office at
Pavia, _circa_ 1547, and he was still at work upon it two years before his
death.[250] It is not difficult to realize, even at this interval of time,
that this book at the date of its publication must have been welcomed by
all musical students as a valuable contribution to the literature of their
subject. It is strongly marked by Cardan's particular touch, that
formative faculty by which he almost always succeeded in stimulating fresh
interest in the reader, and exhibiting fresh aspects of whatever subject
he might be treating. This work begins by laying down at length the
general rules and principles of the art, and then goes on to treat of
ancient music in all its forms; of music as Cardan knew and enjoyed it; of
the system of counterpoint and composition, and of the construction of
musical instruments.
The Commentary on _Ptolemæi de Astrorum Judiciis_, the writing of which
beguiled the tedium of his voyage down the Loire on his journey to Paris
in 1552, is a book upon which he spent great care, and is certainly worthy
of notice. Cardan's gratitude to Archbishop Hamilton for the liberal
treatment and gracious reception he had recently encountered in Scotland,
prompted him to dedicate this volume to his late patient. He writes in the
preface how he had expected to find the Scots a pack of barbarians, but
their country, he affirms, is cultivated and humanized beyond
belief,--"and you yourself reflect such splendour upon your nation that
now, by the very lustre of your name, it must needs appear to the world
more noble and illustrious than at any time heretofore. What need is there
for me to speak of the school founded by you at St. Andrews, of sedition
quelled, of your country delivered, of the authority of your brother the
Regent vindicated? These are merely the indications of your power, and not
the source thereof." In the preface he also writes at length, concerning
the horoscope of Christ,[251] in a strain of apology, as if he scented
already the scandal which the publication of this injudicious performance
was destined to raise. In estimating the influence of comets he sets down
several instances which had evidently been brought to his notice during
his sojourn in Scotland: how in 1165, within fourteen days of the
appearance of a great comet, Malcolm IV., known on account of his
continence as the virgin king, fell sick and died. Again, in 1214 two
comets, one preceding and the other following the sun, appeared as
fore-runners of the death of King William after a reign of forty-nine
years. Perhaps the most interesting of his comments on Ptolemy's text are
those which estimate the power of the stellar influences on the human
frame, an aspect of the question which, by reason of his knowledge of
medicine and surgery, would naturally engage his more serious attention.
He tells of the birth of a monstrous child--a most loathsome
malformation--at Middleton Stoney, near Oxford, during his stay in
England,[252] and gives many other instances of the disastrous effects of
untoward conjunction of the planets upon infants born under the influence
of the same. He accuses monks and nuns of detestable vices in the plainest
words, words which were probably read by the emissaries of the spiritual
authority when the charge of impiety was being got up against him. In the
_Geniturarum Exempla_ the horoscopes of Edward VI., Archbishop Hamilton,
and Cardan himself have been already noticed; that of Sir John Cheke comes
next in interest to these, and, it must be admitted, is no more
trustworthy. It declares that Cheke would attain the age of sixty-one
years, that he would be most fortunate in gathering wealth and friends
around him, that he would die finally of lingering disease, and involve
many in misfortune by his death--a faulty guess, indeed, as to the future
of a man who died at forty-three, borne down by the weight of his
misfortunes, neglected and forgotten by his former adherents, stripped of
his wealth and covered with shame, in that he had abjured his faith to
save a life which was so little worth preserving.
Naudé does not neglect to censure Cardan for his maladroit attempts to
read the future. He writes:--"This matter, forsooth, gave a ready handle
to Cardan's rivals, and especially to those who were sworn foes of
astrology; so that they were able to jibe at him freely because, neither
in his own horoscope, nor in that of his son Giovanni Battista, nor in
that of Aymer Ranconet, nor in that of Edward VI., king of England, nor
in any other of the schemes that he drew, did he rightly foresee any of
the events which followed. He did not divine that he himself was doomed to
imprisonment, his son to the halter, Ranconet to a violent death, and
Edward to a brief term of life, but predicted for each one of these some
future directly contrary."[253]
The treatise _De Consolatione_, probably the best known of Cardan's
ethical works, was first published at Venice in 1542 by Girolamo Scoto,
but it failed at first to please the public taste. It was not until 1544,
when it was re-issued bound up with the _De Sapientia_ and the first
version of the _De Libris Propriis_ from the press of Petreius at
Nuremberg, that it met with any success. Perhaps the sober tone and
didactic method of this treatise appealed more readily to the mood of the
German than of the Italian reader. From internal evidence it is obvious
that Cardan was urged to write it by the desire of making known to the
world the bitter experience of his early literary and professional
struggles. In the opening paragraph he lets it be seen that he intends to
follow a Ciceronian model, and records his regret that the lament of
Cicero over his daughter's death should have perished in the barbarian
wars. The original title of the book was _The Accuser_, to wit, something
which might censure the vain passions and erring tendencies of mankind,
"at post mutato nomine, et in tres libellos diviso, de Consolatione eum
inscripsimus, quod longe magis infelices consolatione, quam fortunati
reprehensione, indigere viderentur." The subsequent success of the book
was probably due to this change of name, though the author himself
preferred to have discovered a special reason for its early failure.[254]
The plan of the treatise is the same as that of a dozen others of the same
nature: an effort to persuade men in evil case that they may find relief
by regarding the misfortunes they suffer as transitory accidents in no way
affecting the chief end of life, and by seeking happiness alone in
trafficking with the riches of the mind.
It is doubtful whether any of the books written with this object have ever
served their purpose, save in the case of their originators. Cardan may
have found the burden of his failure and poverty grow lighter as he set
down his woes on paper, but the rest of the world must have read the book
for some other reason than the hope of consolation. Read to-day in
Bedingfield's quaint English, the book is full of charm and interest. It
is filled with apt illustration from Greek philosophy and from Holy Writ
as well, and lighted up by spaces of lively wit. It was accepted by the
public taste for reasons akin to those which would secure popularity for a
clever volume of essays at the present time, and was translated into more
than one foreign language, Bedingfield's translation being published some
thirty years after its first appearance.
The _De Sapientia_, with which it is generally classed, is of far less
interest. It is a series of ethical discourses, lengthy and discursive,
which must have seemed dull enough to contemporary students: to read it
through now would be a task almost impossible. It is only remembered
because Cardan has inserted therein, somewhat incongruously, that account
of his asserted cures of phthisis which Cassanate quoted when he wrote to
Cardan about Archbishop Hamilton's asthma, and which were afterwards
seized upon by hostile critics as evidence of his disregard of truth.
Another of his minor works highly characteristic of the author is the
_Somniorum Synesiorum_, a collection of all the remarkable dreams he ever
dreamt, many of which have been already noticed. To judge from what
specimens of his epistles are extant, Cardan seems to have been a good
letter-writer. One of the most noteworthy is that which he addressed to
Gian Battista after his marriage. It shows Cardan to have been a loving
father and a master of sapient exhortation, while the son's fate gives
melancholy testimony of the futility of good counsel unaided by direction
and example. He tells of his grief at seeing the evil case into which his
son had fallen, vexed by poverty, disgrace, and loss of health, how he
would gladly even now receive the prodigal into his house (he says nothing
about the wife), did he not fear that such a step would lead to his own
ruin rather than to his son's restoration. After showing that any fresh
misfortune to himself must needs cut away the last hope for Gian Battista,
he sketches out a line of conduct for the ill-starred youth which he
declared, if rightly pursued, might re-establish his fortunes.
He begins by advising his son to read and lay to heart the contents of the
_De Consolatione_ and the _De Utilitate_, and then, somewhat more to the
purpose, promises him half his earnings of the present and the coming
year. Beyond this Gian Battista should have half the salary of any office
which his father might get for himself, and half of the piece of silk
which he had received from the Venetian Ambassador, supposing that the
young man should not be able to get a like piece for himself from the same
source.
He next cites the _De Consolatione_ to demonstrate the futility of
lamentation over misfortune past or present, or indeed over any decree of
fate. He bids Gian Battista reflect that he is human not a brute, a man
not a woman, a Christian not a Moslem or Jew, an Italian not a barbarian,
sprung from a worthy city and family, and from a father whose name by
itself will prove a title to fame. His only real troubles are a weak body
and infirm health--one a gift of heredity, the other aggravated by
dissolute habits. It may be a vain thing for men to congratulate
themselves over their happiness, but it is vainer for them to cry out for
solace over past calamity. Contempt of money is foolish, but contempt of
God is ten times worse. Cardan concludes this part of his letter by
reciting two maxims given him by his father--one, to have daily
remembrance of God and of His vast bounty, the other, to pursue with the
utmost diligence any task taken in hand.
Cardan then treats the scapegrace to a string of maxims from the _De
Utilitate_, maxims which a model son might have read, but which Gian
Battista would certainly put aside unnoticed, and finishes with some
serviceable practical counsel: "Keep your mind calm, go early to bed, for
ours is a hot-blooded race and predisposed to suffer from stone. Take nine
hours' sleep, rise at six and visit your patients, being careful to use no
speech unconnected with the case before you. Avoid heating your body to
perspiration; go forth on horseback, come back on foot; and on your return
put on warm clothes. Drink little, break your fast on bread, dried fish,
and meat, and then give four hours to study, for studies bring pleasure,
relief from care, and mental riches; they are the foundations of renown,
and enable a man to do his duty with credit. See your patients again; and,
before you sup, take exercise in the woods and fields adjacent. Should
you become over-heated or wet with rain, cast off and dry your damp
clothes, and don dry ones. Sup heartily, and go to bed at eight; and when,
by the brevity of the night, this is not convenient, take a corresponding
rest during the day. Abstain from summer fruit, from black wine, from vain
overflow of talk, from falsehood and gaming, from trusting a woman or
over-indulging her, for she is a foolish animal and full of deceit.
Over-fondness towards a woman will surely bring evil upon you. Bleed and
purge yourself as little as possible; learn by experience of other men's
faults and misfortunes; live frugally; bear yourself suavely to all men;
and let study be your main end. All this and more have I set forth in the
books I have named. Trust neither promises nor hopes, for these may be
vain and delusive; and reckon your own only that which you hold in your
hand. Farewell."
From the fact that Cardan took part in an unofficial medical conference in
Paris, that he afterwards superseded Cassanate as the Archbishop of St.
Andrews' physician, and did not find himself with a dozen or so quarrels
on his hands, it may be assumed that he was laudably free from the
jealousy attributed by tradition to his profession. This instance becomes
all the more noteworthy when his natural irascibility, and the character
of the learned controversy of the times comes to be considered. He does
not spare his censure in remarking on the too frequent quarrels of men of
letters,[255] albeit these quarrels must have lent no little gaiety to the
literary world. No one who reads the account of Gian Battista's fate can
doubt the sincerity of Cardan's remorse for that neglect of the boy's
youthful training which helped to bring him to ruin, and the care which he
bestowed upon his grandson Fazio proved that his regret was not of that
sort which exhales itself in empty words. The zeal with which he threw
himself into the struggle for his son's life, and his readiness to strip
himself of his last coin as the fight went on, show that he was capable of
warm-hearted affection, and afraid of no sacrifice in the cause of duty.
The brutal candour which Cardan used in probing the weaknesses of his own
nature and in displaying them to the world, he used likewise in his
dealings with others. If he detected Branda Porro or Camutio in a blunder
he would inform them they were blockheads without hesitation, and plume
himself afterwards on the score of his blunt honesty. Veracity was not a
common virtue in those days, but Cardan laid claim to it with a display of
insistence which was not, perhaps, in the best taste. Over and over again
he writes that he never told a lie;[256] a contention which seems to have
roused especially the bile of Naudé, and to have spurred him on to make
his somewhat clumsy assault on Cardan's veracity.[257] His citation of the
case of the stranger who came with the volume of Apuleius for sale, and of
the miraculous gift of classic tongues, has already been referred to; but
these may surely be attributed to an exaggerated activity of that
particular side of Cardan's imagination which was specially prone to
seize upon some figment of the brain, and some imperfectly apprehended
sensation of the optic nerve, and fashion from these materials a tale of
marvel. Delusions of this sort were common in reputed witches, as Reginald
Scot writes--"They learne strange toongs with small industrie (as
Aristotle and others affirme)."[258] The other charge preferred by Naudé
as to the pretended cure of consumption, and the consequent quibbling and
tergiversation, is a more valid one. It has been noted how Cardan,
previous to his journey to Scotland, had posed as the discoverer of a cure
for this malady. In the list of his cures successfully treated he includes
several in which he restored patients suffering from blood-spitting,
fever, and extreme emaciation to sound health, the most noteworthy of
these being that of Girolamo Tiboldo, a sea-captain. When the sick man had
risen from his bed and had become fat and healthy, Cardan deemed that the
occasion justified a certain amount of self-gratulation, but the
physicians, out of envy, declared that Tiboldo had never suffered from
true phthisis. In his account of the case Cardan says that he, and the
physicians as well, were indeed untruthful over the matter, his own
falsehood having been the result of over-sanguine hope, and theirs the
outcome of spiteful envy. Tiboldo died after all of chest disease, but not
till five years later, and then from a chill caught through sitting in wet
garments.[259] The term consumption has always been applied somewhat
loosely, and Cardan probably would have been allowed the benefit of this
usage if he had not, in an excess of candour, set down the workings of his
mind and conscience with regard to this matter. Writing of his treatment
of Archbishop Hamilton, he says: "And in truth I cured scarcely any
patients of phthisic disease, though I did find a remedy for many who were
suffering from similar maladies, wherefore that boast of mine, that
proclamation of merit to which I had no right, worked no small profit to
me, a man very little given to lying. For the people about the Archbishop,
urged on by these and other considerations, persuaded him that he had no
chance of regaining his health except by putting himself under my care,
and that he should fly to me as his last hope."[260] It has already been
noted that Cardan's claim to some past knowledge in the successful
treatment of chest diseases had weight with the Archbishop and Cassanate,
and the result of his visit surely proved that their confidence was not
ill-placed; his boasting may have been a trifle excessive, but it was
based on hope rather than achievement; and if proof can be adduced that it
was not prompted by any greed of illegitimate fame or profit, it may
justly be ranked as a weakness rather than as a serious offence. To these
two instances of falsehood Naudé adds a third, to wit, Cardan's claim to
the guidance of a familiar spirit. He refuses to let this rank as a
delusion; and, urged no doubt by righteous indignation against the ills
springing from kindred superstitions, he writes down as a liar rather than
a dupe the man who, after mastering the whole world of science, could
profess such folly.
Considering the catholicity of Cardan's achievements, and the eager spirit
of inquiry he displayed in fields of learning remote from his own
particular one, it is worthy of notice that he did not allow this
discursive humour, which is not seldom a token of instability, to hold him
back from pursuing the supreme aim of his life, that is, eminence in the
art of Medicine. In his youth the threats and persuasions of his father
could not induce him to take up Jurisprudence with an assured income and
abandon Medicine. At Sacco, at Gallarate, and afterwards in Milan he was
forced by the necessity of bread-winning to use his pen in all sorts of
minor subjects that had no real fascination for him, but all his leisure
was devoted to the acquisition of Medical knowledge. Prudence as well as
inclination had a share in directing his energies into this channel, for a
report, for which no doubt there was some warrant, was spread abroad that
what skill he had lay entirely in the knowledge of Astrology; and, as this
rumour operated greatly to his prejudice,[261] he resolved to perfect
himself in Medicine and free his reputation from this aspersion. He had
quarrelled violently with the physicians over the case of Count Borromeo's
child which died, and with Borromeo himself, and, almost immediately after
this, he published his book, _De Astrorum Judiciis_, a step which tended
to identify him yet more closely with Astrology, and to raise a cry
against him in Milan, which he declares to be the most scandal-mongering
city in the Universe. But it is clear that in this instance scandal was
not far wrong, and that Cardan himself was right in purging himself of the
quasi science he ought never to have taken up.
Medicine, when Cardan began his studies, was beginning to feel the effects
of the revival of Greek learning. With the restored knowledge of the
language of Greece there arose a desire to investigate the storehouses of
science, as well as those of literature, and the extravagant assumption
of the dogmatists, and the eccentricities of the Arabic school gave
additional cogency to the cry for more light. The sects which Galen had
endeavoured to unite sprang into new activity within a century after his
death. The Arabian physicians, acute and curious as they were, had
exercised but a very transient influence upon the real progress of the
art, the chief cause of their non-success being their adhesion to
arbitrary and empirical tradition. At the end of the fifteenth century,
Leonicinus, a professor at Ferrara, recalled the allegiance of his pupils
to the authority of Hippocrates by the ability and eloquence of his
teaching; and, by his translation of Galen's works into Latin, he helped
still farther to confirm the ascendency of the fathers of Medicine. The
Arabians, sprung from the East, the storehouse of drugs and simples, and
skilled in Chemistry, were the founders of the Pharmacopoeia,[262] but
with this exception they did nothing to advance Medicine beyond the point
where the Greeks had left it. The treatises of Haly, Avicenna, and
Maimonides were little better than faint transcriptions of the writings of
the great forerunners. Their teaching was random and spasmodic, whereas
the system of Hippocrates was conceived in the spirit of Greek philosophy,
moving on by select experience, always observant and cautious, and
ascending by slow and certain steps to the generalities of Theory. Indeed
the science of Medicine in the hands of Hippocrates and his school seems,
more than any other, to have presented to the world a rudimentary essay, a
faint foreshadowing of the great fabric of inductive process, subsequently
formulated by the genius of Bacon. At various epochs Medicine had been
specially stimulated by the vivifying spirit of Greek science; in the
Roman school in the days of Celsus, and in the Arabian teaching likewise.
Fuller acknowledgment of the authority of Greek Medicine came with the
Renaissance,[263] but even this long step in advance did not immediately
liberate the art from bondage. A new generation of professors arose who
added fresh material to the storehouses, already overflowing, of pedantic
erudition, and showed the utmost contempt for any fruit of other men's
labour which might not square exactly with the utterances of the founders.
This attitude rendered these professors of Medicine the legitimate objects
of ridicule, as soon as the leaven of the revival began to work, and the
darts of satire still fly, now and then, at the same quarry. Paracelsus,
disfigured as his teaching was by mysticism, the arts of the charlatan,
and by his ignorant repudiation of the service of Anatomy, struck the
first damaging blows at this illegitimate ascendency, by the frequent
success of his empirical treatment, by the contempt he heaped upon the
scholastic authorities, and by the boldness with which he assailed every
thesis which they maintained. Men of more sober intellect and weighty
learning soon followed in his track. Fernelius, one of the physicians
Cardan met in Paris, boldly rejected what he could not approve by
experience in the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, and stood forth as
the advocate for free inquiry, and Joubert of Montpelier, Argentier of
Turin, and Botal of Asti subsequently took a similar course.
When Cardan went to study at Pavia in 1519 this tradition was unshaken. It
was not until the advent of Vesalius that the doom of the ancient system
was sounded. Then, when Anatomy sprang to the front as the potent ally of
Medicine, the science of healing entered upon a fresh stage, but this new
force did not make itself felt soon enough to seduce Cardan from the
altars of the ancients to the worship of new gods. As long as he lived he
was a follower of the great masters, though at the same time his
admiration of the teaching of Vesalius was enthusiastic and profound. His
love of truth and sound learning forbade him to give unreflecting adhesion
to the precepts of any man, however eminent, and when he found that Galen
was a careless commentator on Hippocrates,[264] and failed to elucidate
the difficulties with which he professed to deal, he did not spare his
censure.[265] In the _De Subtilitate_ he speaks of him as "Verbosus et
studio contradicendi tædulus ut alterum vix ferre queas, in reliquo gravis
jactura artium posita sit, quam nostræ ætatis viri restituere conati
sunt."[266] But as Galen's name is quoted as an authority on almost every
page of the _Consilia Medica_, it may be assumed that Cardan's faith in
his primary theories was unshaken. In his Commentaries on Hippocrates,
Galen professes a profound respect for his master, but the two great men
must be regarded as the leaders of rival schools; indeed it could hardly
be otherwise, seeing how vast was the mass of knowledge which Galen added
to the art during his lifetime.
Hippocrates, by denying the supernatural origin of disease, by his method
of diagnosis, by the importance he attached to air and diet, by his
discriminating use of drugs, and by the simplicity of his system
generally, had placed Medicine on a rational basis. In the six hundred
years' space which elapsed before the appearance of Galen, Medicine was
broken up into many rival schools. The Dogmatici and the Empirici for many
years wrangled undisturbed, but shortly after the Christian era the
Methodici entered the field, to be followed later on by the Eclectici and
a troop of other sects, whose wranglings, and whose very names, are now
forgotten. In his _History of Medicine_, Dr. Bostock gives a sketch of the
attitude of Galen towards the rival schools. "In his general principles he
may be considered as belonging to the Dogmatic sect, for his method was to
reduce all his knowledge, as acquired by the observation of facts, to
general theoretical principles. These principles he indeed professed to
deduce from experience and observation,[267] and we have abundant proofs
of his diligence in collecting experience and his accuracy in making
observations; but still, in a certain sense at least, he regards
individual facts and the details of experience as of little value,
unconnected with the principles which he laid down as the basis of all
medical reasoning. In this fundamental point, therefore, the method
pursued by Galen appears to have been directly the reverse of that which
we now consider as the correct method of scientific investigation; and
yet, such is the force of actual genius, that in most instances he
attained the ultimate object in view, although by an indirect path. He was
an admirer of Hippocrates, and always speaks of him with the most profound
respect, professing to act upon his principles, and to do little more
than expound his doctrines and support them by new facts and observations.
Yet in reality we have few writers whose works, both as to substance and
manner, are more different from each other than those of Hippocrates and
Galen, the simplicity of the former being strongly contrasted with the
abstruseness and refinement of the latter."
The antagonism between these two great men was not perhaps more marked
than might have been expected, considering that an interval of six hundred
years lay between them. However loyal he may have been to his master,
Galen, with his keen, catholic, and subtle intellect, was bound to fall
under the sway of Alexandrian influence while he studied in Alexandria as
the pupil of Heraclianus. The methods of the contemporary school of
philosophy fascinated him; and, in his endeavour to bring Medicine out of
the chaotic welter in which he found it, he attempted--unhappily for the
future of science--to use the hyper-idealistic Platonism then dominant in
Alexandria, rather than the gradual and orderly induction of Hippocrates,
as a bond of union between professional and scientific medicine; a false
step for which not even his great services to anatomy and physiology can
altogether atone. Yet most likely it was this same error, an error which
practically led to the enslavement of Medicine till the seventeenth
century, which caused Cardan to regard him, and not Hippocrates, as his
master. The vastness and catholicity of Galen's scheme of Medicine must
have been peculiarly attractive to a man of Cardan's temper; and that
Galen attempted to reconcile the incongruous in the teleological system
which he devised, would not have been rated as a fault by his Milanese
disciple.
Galen taught as a cardinal truth the doctrine of the Hippocratic
elements, heat, cold, moisture, and dryness, and a glance at the Consilium
which Cardan wrote out on Archbishop Hamilton's illness, will show how
completely he was under the sway of this same teaching. The genius of
Hippocrates was perhaps too sober and orderly to win his entire sympathy;
the encyclopædic knowledge, the literary grace, and the more daring
flights of Galen's intellect attracted him much more strongly. Hippocrates
scoffed at charms and amulets, while Galen commended them, and is said to
have invented the anodyne necklace which was long known and worn in
England. There is no need to specify which of the masters Cardan would
swear by in this matter. The choice which Cardan made, albeit it was
exactly what might have been anticipated, was in every respect an
unfortunate one. He put himself under a master whose teaching could have
no other effect than to accentuate the failings of the pupil, whereas had
he let his mind come under the more regular discipline of Hippocrates'
method, it is almost certain that the mass of his work, now shut in dusty
folios which stand undisturbed on the shelves for decade after decade,
would have been immeasurably more fruitful of good. With all his industry
in collecting, and his care in verifying, his medical work remains a heap
of material, and nothing more valuable. Learning and science would have
profited much had he put himself under the standard of the Father of
Medicine, and still more if fate had sent him into being at some period
after the world of letters had learned to realize the capabilities of the
inductive system of Philosophy.
It may readily be conceded that Cardan during his career turned to good
account the medical knowledge which he had gathered from the best
attainable sources, and that he was on the whole the most skilful
physician of his age. He likewise foreshadowed the system of deaf mute
instruction. A certain Georgius Agricola, a physician of Heidelberg who
died in 1485, makes mention of a deaf mute who had learnt to read and
write, but this statement was received with incredulity. Cardan, taking a
more philosophic view, declared that people thus afflicted might easily be
taught to hear by reading, and to speak by writing; writing was associated
with speech, and speech with thought, but written characters and ideas
might be connected without the intervention of sounds.[268] This view, put
forward with all the authority of Cardan's name, would certainly rouse
fresh interest in the question, and, whether stimulated by his words or
not, an attempt to teach deaf mutes was made by Pedro de Ponce, a Spanish
Dominican, about 1560. But it would not be permissible to claim for Cardan
any share in the epoch-making discoveries in Medicine. Galen as an
experimental physiologist had brought diagnosis to a level unattained
before. His methods had been abandoned by his successors, and practice had
in consequence suffered deterioration, but Cardan, studying under the
revived Galenism, called into life by the teaching of Vesalius, went to
deal with his cures under conditions more favourable than those offered by
any previous period of the world's history. His cure of Archbishop
Hamilton's asthma, over which Cassanate and the other doctors had failed,
was due to a more careful diagnosis and a more judicious application of
existing rules, rather than to the working of any new discoveries of his
own. Viewed as a soldier in the service of Hygeia, how transient and
slender is the fame of Cardan compared with that of Linacre, Vesalius, or
Harvey! Were his claims to immortality to rest entirely on his
contribution to Medicine, his name would have gone down to oblivion along
with that of Cavenago, Camutio, Della Croce, and the multitude of jealous
rivals who, according to his account, were ever plotting his downfall. But
it was rescued from this fate by his excellence as a mathematician, by the
interest clinging to his personality, by the enormous range of his
learning, by his picturesque reputation as a dreamer of dreams, and a
searcher into the secrets of the hidden world. In an age when books were
few and ill-composed, his works became widely popular; because, although
he dealt with abstruse subjects, he wrote--as even Naudé admits--in a
passably good style, and handled his subject with a lightness of touch
which was then very rare. This was the reason why men went on reading him
long after his works had ceased to have any scientific value; which
induced writers like Burton and Sir Thomas Browne to embroider their pages
freely with quotations from his works, and thus make his name familiar to
many who have never handled a single one of his volumes.
It is somewhat strange to find running through the complex web of Cardan's
character a well-defined thread of worldly wisdom and common-sense; to
find that a man, described by almost every one who has dealt with his
character as a credulous simpleton, one with disordered wits, or a
down-right madman, should, when occasion demanded, prove himself to be a
sharp man of business. When Fazio died he left his son with a number of
unsettled law-suits on hand, concerning which he writes: "From my father's
death until I was forty-six, that is to say for a space of twenty-three
years, I was almost continually involved in law-suits. First with
Alessandro Castillione, surnamed Gatico, with respect to certain
plantations, and afterwards with his kinsfolk. Next with the Counts of
Barbiani, next with the college, next with the heirs of Dominico de
Tortis, who had held me in his arms when I was baptized. Out of all these
suits I came victorious. It was indeed a matter for surprise that I should
have got the better of Alessandro Castillione, seeing that his uncle sat
as judge. Moreover, he had already got a decision against me, a decision
which, as the jurisconsults declared, helped my case as the trial went on,
and I was able to force him to pay me all the money which was in dispute.
A like good fortune attended me while my claims were considered by the
heads of the Milanese College, and finally rejected by several votes. Then
afterwards, when they had decided to admit me, and when they tried to
subject me to certain rules which placed me on a footing inferior to their
own, I compelled them to grant me full membership. In the case of the
Barbiani, after long litigation and many angry words and much trouble, I
came to terms with them; and, having received the sum of money covenanted
by agreement, I was entirely freed from vexation of the law."[269] Writing
generally of his monetary dealings, Cardan says: "Whenever I may have
incurred a loss, I have never been content merely to retrieve the same, I
have always contrived to seize upon something extra."[270] Or again: "If
at any time I have lost twenty crowns, I have never rested until I have
succeeded in getting back these and twenty more in addition."[271]
Cardan left in his _Dicta Familiaria_ and _Præceptorum ad filios
Libellus_ a long list of aphorisms and counsels, many of which give
evidence of keen insight and busy observation of mankind, while some are
distinguished by a touch of humour rare in his other writings. He bids his
children to be careful how they offend princes, and, offence being given,
never to flatter themselves that it has been pardoned; to live joyfully as
long as they can, for men are for the most part worn out by care; never to
take a wife from a witless stock or one tainted with hereditary disease;
to refrain from deliberating when the mind is disturbed; to learn how to
be worsted and suffer loss; and to trust a school-master to teach
children, but not to feed them. One of the dicta is a gem of quaint
wisdom. "Before you begin to wash your face, see that you have a towel
handy to dry the same." If all the instances of prodigies, portents,
visions, and mysterious warnings which Cardan has left on record were set
down in order, a perusal of this catalogue would justify, if it did not
compel, the belief that he was little better than a credulous fool, and
raise doubts whether such a man could have written such orderly and
coherent works as the treatise on Arithmetic, or the book of the Great
Art. But Cardan was beyond all else a man of moods, and it would be unfair
to figure as his normal mental condition those periods of overwrought
nervousness and the hallucinations they brought with them. In his old age
the nearness of the inevitable stroke, and the severance of all earthly
ties, led him to discipline his mind into a calmer mood, but early and
late during his season of work his nature was singularly sensitive to the
wearing assaults of cares and calamities. In crises of this kind his mind
would be brought into so morbid a condition, that it would fall entirely
under the sway of any single idea then dominant; such idea would master
him entirely, or even haunt him like one of those unclean spectres he
describes with such gusto in the _De Varietate_. What he may have uttered
when these moods were upon him must not be taken seriously; these are the
moments to which the major part of his experiences of things _supra
naturam_ may be referred. But there are numerous instances in which he
describes marvellous phenomena with philosophic calm, and examines them in
the true spirit of scepticism. In his account of the trembling of the bed
on which he lay the night before he heard of Gian Battista's marriage, he
goes on to say that a few nights after the first manifestation, he was
once more conscious of a strange movement; and, having put his hand to his
breast, found that his heart was palpitating violently because he had been
lying on his left side. Then he remembered that a similar physical trouble
had accompanied the first trembling of the bed, and admits that this
manifestation may be referred to a natural cause, _i.e._ the palpitation.
He tells also how he found amongst his father's papers a record of a cure
of the gout by a prayer offered to the Virgin at eight in the morning on
the first of April, and how he duly put up the prayer and was cured of the
gout, but he adds: "Sed in hoc, auxiliis etiam artis usus sum."[272] Again
with regard to the episode of the ignition of his bed twice in the same
night, without visible cause, he says that this portent may have come
about by some supernatural working; but that, on the other hand, it may
have been the result of mere chance. He tells another story of an
experience which befell him when he was in Belgium.[273] He was aroused
early in the morning by the noise made outside his door by a dog catching
fleas. Having got out of bed to see to this, he heard the sound as of a
key being softly put into the lock. He told this fact to the servants, who
at once took up the tale, and persuaded themselves that they had heard
many noises of the same kind, and others vastly more wonderful; in short,
the whole house was swarming with apparitions. The next night the noise
was repeated, and a second observation laid bare the real cause thereof.
The scratching of the dog had caused the bolt to fall into the socket, and
this produced the noise which had disquieted him. He writes in conclusion:
"Thus many events which seem to defy all explanation have really come to
pass by accident, or in the course of nature. Out of such manifestations
as these the unlettered, the superstitious, the timorous, and the
over-hasty make for themselves miracles."[274] Again, after telling a
strange story of a boy who beheld the image of a thief in the neck of a
phial, and of some incantations of Josephus Niger, he concludes:
"Nevertheless I am of opinion that all these things were fables, and that
no one could have had any real knowledge thereof, seeing that they were
nothing else than vain triflings."[275]
In a nature so complex and many-sided as Cardan's, strange resemblances
may be sought for and discovered, and it certainly is an unexpected
revelation to find a mental attitude common to Cardan, a man tied and
bound by authority and the traditions of antiquity, and such a daring
assailant of the schools and of Aristotle as Doctor Joseph Glanvil. The
conclusions of Cardan as to certain obscure phenomena recently cited show
that, in matters lying beyond sensual cognition, he kept an open mind. In
summing up the case of the woman said to have been cured by the
incantations of Josephus Niger, he says that she must have been cured
either by the power of the imagination, or by the agency of the demons.
Here he anticipates the arguments which Glanvil sets forth in _Sadducismus
Triumphatus_. Writing on the belief in witchcraft Glanvil says, "We have
the attestation of thousands of eye and ear witnesses, and these not of
the easily-deceivable vulgar only, but of wise and grave discerners; and
that when no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common Lye.
I say, we have the light of all these circumstances to confirm us in the
belief of things done by persons of despicable power and knowledge, beyond
the reach of Art and ordinary Nature. Standing public Records have been
kept of these well-attested Relations, and Epochas made of those unwonted
events. Laws in many Nations have been enacted against those vile
practices; those amongst the Jews and our own are notorious; such cases
have often been determined near us by wise and reverend Judges, upon clear
and convictive Evidence; and thousands of our own Nation have suffered
death for their vile compacts with Apostate spirits. All these I might
largely prove in their particular instances, but that 'tis not needful
since these did deny the being of Witches, so it was not out of ignorance
of these heads of Argument, of which probably they have heard a thousand
times; but from an apprehension that such a belief is absurd, and the
things impossible. And upon these presumptions they condemn all
demonstrations of this nature, and are hardened against conviction. And I
think those that can believe all Histories and Romances; That all the
wiser would have agreed together to juggle mankind into a common belief of
ungrounded fables, that the sound senses of multitudes together may
deceive them, and Laws are built upon Chimeras; That the greatest and
wisest Judges have been Murderers, and the sagest persons Fools, or
designing Impostors; I say those that can believe this heap of
absurdities, are either more credulous than those whose credulity they
reprehend; or else have some extraordinary evidence of their perswasion,
viz.: That it is absurd and impossible that there should be a Witch or
Apparition."[276] Cardan's argument in the case of the sick woman, that it
would be difficult if not impossible to invent cause for her cure, other
than the power of imagination or Demoniac agency, if less emphatic and
lengthy than Glanvil's, certainly runs upon parallel lines therewith, and
suggests, if it does not proclaim, the existence of such a thing as the
credulity of unbelief; in other words that those who were disposed to
brush aside the alternative causes of the cure as set down by him, and
search for others, and put faith in them, would be fully as credulous as
those who held the belief which he recorded as his own.
FOOTNOTES:
[248] _De Varietate_, p. 314.
[249] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxxvii. p. 115.
[250] "Musicam, sed hanc anno post VI. scilicet MDLXXIV. correxi et
transcribi curavi."--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xlv. p. 176.
[251] This is on p. 164.
[252] Page 266.
[253] _Judicium de Cardano_.
[254] Page 57.
[255] "Ita nostra ætate, lapsi sunt clarissimi alioqui viri in hoc genere.
Budæus adversus Erasmum, Fuchsius adversus Cornarium, Silvius adversus
Vesalium, Nizolius adversus Maioragium: non tam credo justis contentionum
causis, quam vanitate quadam et spe augendæ opinionis in
hominibus."--_Opera_, tom. i. p. 135.
[256] He writes in this strain in _De Vita Propria_, ch. xiv. p. 49, in
_De Varietate Rerum_, p. 626, and in _Geniturarum Exempla_, p. 431.
[257] On the subject of dissimulation Cardan writes: "Assuevi vultum in
contrarium semper efformare; ideo simulare possum, dissimulare
nescio."--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xiii. p. 42. Again in _Libellus
Præceptorum ad filios_ (_Opera_, tom. i. p. 481), "Nolite unquam mentiri,
sed circumvenire [circumvenite?]."
[258] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, ch. xi.
[259] Donato Lanza, the druggist, who had been his first introducer to
Sfondrato, was equally perverse. After Cardan had cured him of phthisis,
he jumped out of a window to avoid arrest, and fell into a fish-pond, and
died of the cold he took.--_Opera_, tom. i. p. 83.
[260] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 136.
[261] _De Vita Propria_, ch. x. p. 32.
[262] The Materia Medica of Mesua, dating from the eleventh century, was
used by the London College of Physicians in framing their Pharmacopoeia in
1618.
[263] In 1443 a copy of Celsus was found at Milan; Paulus Ægineta was
discovered a little later.
[264] _Opera_, tom. ix. p. 1.
[265] _De Immortalitate Animorum_ (Lyons, 1545), p. 73. _De Varietate_, p.
77. _Opera_, tom. i. p. 135.
[266] _De Subtilitate_, p. 445.
[267] "Galen's great complaint against the Peripatetics or Aristotelians,
was that while they discoursed about Anatomy they could not dissect. He
met an argument with a dissection or an experiment. Come and see for
yourselves, was his constant cry."--_Harveian Oration_, Dr. J.F. Payne,
1896.
[268] _Opera_, tom. x. p. 462.
[269] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxviii. p. 73.
[270] _Ibid.,_ ch. xxiii. p. 64.
[271] _De Utilitate_, p. 309. He also writes at length in the Proxenata on
Domestic Economy.--Chapter xxxvii. _et seq. Opera_, tom. i. p. 377.
[272] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxxvii. p. 118.
[273] _De Varietate_, p. 589.
[274] _De Varietate_, p. 589.
[275] _Ibid.,_ p. 640.
[276] _Sadducismus Triumphatus_ (Ed. 1682), p. 4.