Jerome Cardan, William George Waters [reading list TXT] 📗
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one--upon the author. The printer, Petrus of Basel (who must not be confused with Petreius of Nuremberg) took it upon him to add to Chapter LXXX of the work some disparaging remarks about the Dominican brotherhoods, making Cardan responsible for the assertion that they were rapacious wolves who hunted down reputed witches and despisers of God, not because of their offences, but because they chanced to be the possessors of much wealth. Cardan remonstrated at once--he always made it his practice to keep free from all theological wrangling,--but Petrus treated the whole question with ridicule,[173] and it does not seem that Cardan could have had any very strong feeling in the matter, for the obnoxious passage is retained in the editions of 1556 and 1557. The religious authorities were however fully justified in assuming that the presence of such a passage in the pages of a book so widely popular as the _De Varietate_ would necessarily prove a cause of scandal, and give cause to the enemy to blaspheme. For Reginald Scot, in the eighth chapter of _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, alludes to the passage in question in the following terms: "Cardanus writeth that the cause of such credulitie consisteth in three points: to wit in the imagination of the melancholike, in the constancie of them that are corrupt therewith, and in the deceipt of the Judges; who being inquisitors themselves against heretikes and witches, did both accuse and condemne them, having for their labour the spoile of their goods. So as these inquisitors added many fables hereunto, least they should seeme to have doone injurie to the poore wretches, in condemning and executing them for none offense. But sithens (said he) the springing up of Luther's sect, these priests have tended more diligentlie upon the execution of them; bicause more wealth is to be caught from them; insomuch as now they deale so looselie with witches (through distrust of gaines) that all is seene to be malice, follie, or avarice that hath beene practised against them. And whosoever shall search into this cause, or read the cheefe writers hereupon, shall find his words true."
In 1554 Cardan published also with Petrus of Basel the _Ptolemaei de astrorum judiciis_ with the _Geniturarum Exempla_, bound in one volume, but he seems to have written nothing but a book of fables for the young, concerning which he subsequently remarks that, in his opinion, grown men might read the same with advantage. It is a matter of regret that this work should have disappeared, for it would have been interesting to note how far Cardan's intellect, acute and many-sided as it was, was capable of dealing with the literature of allegory and imagination. He has set down one fact concerning it, to wit that it contained "multa de futuris arcana." The next year he produced only a few medical trifles, but in 1557 he brought out two other scientific works which he characterizes as admirable--one the _Ars parva curandi_, and the other a treatise _De Urinis_. In the same year he published the book which, in forming a judgment of him as a man and a writer, is perhaps as valuable as the _De Vita Propria_ and the _De Utilitate_, to wit the _De Libriis Propriis_. This work exists in three forms: the first, a short treatise, "cui titulus est ephemerus," is dedicated to "Hieronymum Cardanum medicum, affinem suum," and has the date of 1543. The second has the date of 1554, and, according to Naude, was first published "apud Gulielmum Rovillium sub scuto Veneto, Lugduni, 1557." The third was begun in 1560,[174] and contains comments written in subsequent years. The first is of slight interest, the second is a sort of register of his works, amplified from year to year, while the third has more the form of a treatise, and presents with some degree of symmetry the crude materials contained in the first. Having finished with his writings up to the year 1564, Cardan lapses into a philosophizing strain, and opens his discourse with the ominous words, "Sed jam ad institutum revertamur, deque ipso vitae humanae genere aliquo dicamus." He begins with a disquisition on the worthlessness of life, and repeats somewhat tediously the story of his visit to Scotland. He gives a synopsis of all the sciences he had ever studied--Theology, Dialectics, Arithmetic, Music, Optics, Astronomy, Astrology, Geometry, Chiromancy, Agriculture, Medicine, passing on to treat of Magic, portents and warnings, and of his own experience of the same at the crucial moments of his life. He ends by a reference to an incident already chronicled in the _De Vita Propria_,[175] how he escaped death or injury from a falling mass of masonry by crossing the street in obedience to an impulse he could not explain, and speculates why God, who was able to save him on this occasion with so little trouble, should have let him rush on and court the overwhelming stroke which ultimately laid him low.
FOOTNOTES:
[162] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxxii. p. 100.
[163] _De Vita Propria_, ch. iv. p. 16: "cum Scotorum Regina cujus levirum curaveram." Cardan had probably prescribed for a brother of the Duc de Longueville, the first husband of Mary of Guise, during his sojourn in Paris.
[164] _Geniturarum Exempla_, p. 459. [165] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xl. p. 137.
[166] _Commentaria in Ptolemaei de Astrorum Judiciis_ (Basil, 1554). He wrote these notes while going down the Loire in company with Cassanate on his way from Lyons to Paris in 1552.--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xlv. p. 175.
He gives an interesting account (_Opera_, tom. i. p. 110) as to how the book first came under his notice. The day before he quitted Lyons with Cassanate, a school-master came to ask for advice, which Cardan gave gratis. Then the patient, knowing perhaps the physician's taste for the marvellous, related how there was a certain boy in the place who could see spirits by looking into an earthen vessel, but Cardan was little impressed by what he saw, and began to talk with the school-master about Archimedes. The school-master brought out a work of the Greek philosopher with which was bound up the _Ptolemaei Libri de Judiciis_. Cardan fastened upon it at once, and wanted to buy it, but the school-master insisted that he should take it as a gift. He declares that his Commentaries thereupon are the most perfect of all his writings. The book contains his famous Nativity of Christ. A remark in _De Libris Propriis_ (cf. _Opera_, tom. i. p. 67) indicates that there was an earlier edition of Ptolemy, printed at Milan at Cardan's own cost, because when he saw the numerous mistakes made by Ottaviano Scoto in printing the _De Malo Medendi_ and the _De Consolatione_, he determined to go to another printer.
[167] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 93.
[168] Cardan notices the attack in these words--"His diebus quidam conscripserat adversus nostrum de Subtilitate librum, Opus ingens. Adversus quem ego Apologiam scripsi."--_Opera_, tom. i. p. 117. Scaliger absurdly calls his work the _fifteenth_ book of _Exercitations_, and wished the world to believe that he had written, though not printed, the fourteen others.
[169] It was not printed until many years after the deaths of both disputants, and appeared for the first time in a volume of Scaliger's letters and speeches published at Toulouse in 1621, and it was afterwards affixed to the _De Vita Propria_.
[170] "Si Scaliger avoit eu un peu moins de demangeaison de contre dire, il auroit acquis plus de gloire, qu'il n'a fait dans ce combat: mais, ce que les Grecs ont apelle [Greek: ametria tes antholkes], une passion excessive de prendre le contrepied des autres, a fait grand tort a Scaliger. C'est par ce principe qu'il a soutenu que le perroquet est une tres laide bete. Si Cardan l'eut dit, Scaliger lui eut oppose ce qu'on trouve dans les anciens Poetes touchant la beaute de cet oiseau. Vossius a fait une Critique tres judicieuse de cette humeur contrariante de Scaliger, et a marque en meme temps en quoi ces deux Antagonistes etoient superieurs et inferieures, l'un a l'autre."--(Scaliger, in _Exercitat.,_ 246.) "Quia Cardanus psittacum commendarat a colorum varietate ac praeterea fulgore, quod et Appuleius facit in secundo Floridorum, contra contendit esse deformem, non modo ob foeditatem rostri, ac crurum, et linguae, sed etiam quia sit coloris fusci ac cinericii, qui tristis. Quid faciamus summo Viro? Si Cardanus ea dixisset, provocasset ad judicia poetarum, atque adeo omnium hominum. Nunc quia pulchri dixit coloris, ille deformis contendit. Hoc contradictionis studium, quod ubique in hisce exercitationibus se prodit, sophista dignius est, quamque philosopho."--Bayle: Article "Cardan." (Sir Thomas Browne, in one of his Commonplace Books, observes--"If Cardan saith a parrot is a beautiful bird, Scaliger will set his wits on work to prove it a deformed animal.")
Naude (_Apologie_, ch. xiii.) says that of the great men of modern times Scaliger and Cardan each claimed the possession of a guardian spirit, and hints that Scaliger may have been moved to make this claim in order not to be outdone by his great antagonist. It should, however, be remembered that Cardan did not seriously assert this belief till long after his controversy with Scaliger. Naude sums up thus: "D'ou l'on peut juger asseurement, que lui et Scaliger n'ont point eu d'autre Genie que la grande doctrine qu'ils s'etoient acquis par leurs veilles, par leurs travaux, et par l'experience qu'ils avoient des choses sur lesquelles venant a elever leur jugement ils jugeoint pertinemment de toutes matieres, et ne laissoient rien echapper qui ne leur fust conneu et manifeste."
[171] Thuanus, ad Annum MDLXXVI, part of the Appendix to the _De Vita Propria_.
[172] Cardan does not seem to have harboured animosity against Scaliger. In the _De Vita Propria_, ch. xlviii. p. 198, he writes: "Julius Caesar Scaliger plures mihi titulos ascribit, quam ego mihi concedi postulassem, appellans _ingenium profundissimum, felicissimum, et incomparabile_."
[173] "Quid tua interest quod quatuor verba adjecerim? an hoc tantum crimen est! quid facerem absens absenti?" Cardan writes on in meditative strain: "Coeterum cum non ignorem maculatos fuisse codices B. Hieronimi, atque aliorum patrum nostrorum, ab his qui aliter sentiebant, erroremque suum auctoritate viri tegere voluerunt: ut ne quis in nostris operibus hallucinetur vel ab aliis decipiatur, sciant omnes me nullibi Theologum agere, nec velle in alienam messem falcem ponere."--_Opera_, tom. i. p. 112.
Johannes Wierus, one of the first rationalists on the subject of witchcraft, has quoted largely from Chapter LXXX of _De Varietate_ in his book _De Praestigiis Daemonum_, in urging his case against the orthodox view.
[174] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 96. "Annus hic est Salutis millesimus quingentesimus ac sexagesimus."
[175] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxx. p. 78.
CHAPTER IX
THE year 1555 may be held to mark the point of time at which Cardan reached the highest point of his fortunes. After a long and bitter struggle with an adverse world he had come out a conqueror, and his rise to fame and opulence, if somewhat slow, had been steady and secure. He longed for wealth, not that he might figure as a rich man, but so that he might win the golden independence which permits a student to prosecute the task which seems to subserve the highest purposes of true learning, and frees him from the irksome battle for daily bread. He loved, indeed, to spend money over beautiful things, and there are few more attractive touches in the picture he draws of himself than the confession of his passion for costly penholders, gems, rare books, vessels of brass and silver, and painted spheres.[176] In this brief season of ease and security, there were no flaming portents in the sky to foretell the cruel stroke of evil fortune which was destined so soon to fall upon him.
Cardan has left a very pathetic sketch of his own miserable
In 1554 Cardan published also with Petrus of Basel the _Ptolemaei de astrorum judiciis_ with the _Geniturarum Exempla_, bound in one volume, but he seems to have written nothing but a book of fables for the young, concerning which he subsequently remarks that, in his opinion, grown men might read the same with advantage. It is a matter of regret that this work should have disappeared, for it would have been interesting to note how far Cardan's intellect, acute and many-sided as it was, was capable of dealing with the literature of allegory and imagination. He has set down one fact concerning it, to wit that it contained "multa de futuris arcana." The next year he produced only a few medical trifles, but in 1557 he brought out two other scientific works which he characterizes as admirable--one the _Ars parva curandi_, and the other a treatise _De Urinis_. In the same year he published the book which, in forming a judgment of him as a man and a writer, is perhaps as valuable as the _De Vita Propria_ and the _De Utilitate_, to wit the _De Libriis Propriis_. This work exists in three forms: the first, a short treatise, "cui titulus est ephemerus," is dedicated to "Hieronymum Cardanum medicum, affinem suum," and has the date of 1543. The second has the date of 1554, and, according to Naude, was first published "apud Gulielmum Rovillium sub scuto Veneto, Lugduni, 1557." The third was begun in 1560,[174] and contains comments written in subsequent years. The first is of slight interest, the second is a sort of register of his works, amplified from year to year, while the third has more the form of a treatise, and presents with some degree of symmetry the crude materials contained in the first. Having finished with his writings up to the year 1564, Cardan lapses into a philosophizing strain, and opens his discourse with the ominous words, "Sed jam ad institutum revertamur, deque ipso vitae humanae genere aliquo dicamus." He begins with a disquisition on the worthlessness of life, and repeats somewhat tediously the story of his visit to Scotland. He gives a synopsis of all the sciences he had ever studied--Theology, Dialectics, Arithmetic, Music, Optics, Astronomy, Astrology, Geometry, Chiromancy, Agriculture, Medicine, passing on to treat of Magic, portents and warnings, and of his own experience of the same at the crucial moments of his life. He ends by a reference to an incident already chronicled in the _De Vita Propria_,[175] how he escaped death or injury from a falling mass of masonry by crossing the street in obedience to an impulse he could not explain, and speculates why God, who was able to save him on this occasion with so little trouble, should have let him rush on and court the overwhelming stroke which ultimately laid him low.
FOOTNOTES:
[162] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxxii. p. 100.
[163] _De Vita Propria_, ch. iv. p. 16: "cum Scotorum Regina cujus levirum curaveram." Cardan had probably prescribed for a brother of the Duc de Longueville, the first husband of Mary of Guise, during his sojourn in Paris.
[164] _Geniturarum Exempla_, p. 459. [165] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xl. p. 137.
[166] _Commentaria in Ptolemaei de Astrorum Judiciis_ (Basil, 1554). He wrote these notes while going down the Loire in company with Cassanate on his way from Lyons to Paris in 1552.--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xlv. p. 175.
He gives an interesting account (_Opera_, tom. i. p. 110) as to how the book first came under his notice. The day before he quitted Lyons with Cassanate, a school-master came to ask for advice, which Cardan gave gratis. Then the patient, knowing perhaps the physician's taste for the marvellous, related how there was a certain boy in the place who could see spirits by looking into an earthen vessel, but Cardan was little impressed by what he saw, and began to talk with the school-master about Archimedes. The school-master brought out a work of the Greek philosopher with which was bound up the _Ptolemaei Libri de Judiciis_. Cardan fastened upon it at once, and wanted to buy it, but the school-master insisted that he should take it as a gift. He declares that his Commentaries thereupon are the most perfect of all his writings. The book contains his famous Nativity of Christ. A remark in _De Libris Propriis_ (cf. _Opera_, tom. i. p. 67) indicates that there was an earlier edition of Ptolemy, printed at Milan at Cardan's own cost, because when he saw the numerous mistakes made by Ottaviano Scoto in printing the _De Malo Medendi_ and the _De Consolatione_, he determined to go to another printer.
[167] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 93.
[168] Cardan notices the attack in these words--"His diebus quidam conscripserat adversus nostrum de Subtilitate librum, Opus ingens. Adversus quem ego Apologiam scripsi."--_Opera_, tom. i. p. 117. Scaliger absurdly calls his work the _fifteenth_ book of _Exercitations_, and wished the world to believe that he had written, though not printed, the fourteen others.
[169] It was not printed until many years after the deaths of both disputants, and appeared for the first time in a volume of Scaliger's letters and speeches published at Toulouse in 1621, and it was afterwards affixed to the _De Vita Propria_.
[170] "Si Scaliger avoit eu un peu moins de demangeaison de contre dire, il auroit acquis plus de gloire, qu'il n'a fait dans ce combat: mais, ce que les Grecs ont apelle [Greek: ametria tes antholkes], une passion excessive de prendre le contrepied des autres, a fait grand tort a Scaliger. C'est par ce principe qu'il a soutenu que le perroquet est une tres laide bete. Si Cardan l'eut dit, Scaliger lui eut oppose ce qu'on trouve dans les anciens Poetes touchant la beaute de cet oiseau. Vossius a fait une Critique tres judicieuse de cette humeur contrariante de Scaliger, et a marque en meme temps en quoi ces deux Antagonistes etoient superieurs et inferieures, l'un a l'autre."--(Scaliger, in _Exercitat.,_ 246.) "Quia Cardanus psittacum commendarat a colorum varietate ac praeterea fulgore, quod et Appuleius facit in secundo Floridorum, contra contendit esse deformem, non modo ob foeditatem rostri, ac crurum, et linguae, sed etiam quia sit coloris fusci ac cinericii, qui tristis. Quid faciamus summo Viro? Si Cardanus ea dixisset, provocasset ad judicia poetarum, atque adeo omnium hominum. Nunc quia pulchri dixit coloris, ille deformis contendit. Hoc contradictionis studium, quod ubique in hisce exercitationibus se prodit, sophista dignius est, quamque philosopho."--Bayle: Article "Cardan." (Sir Thomas Browne, in one of his Commonplace Books, observes--"If Cardan saith a parrot is a beautiful bird, Scaliger will set his wits on work to prove it a deformed animal.")
Naude (_Apologie_, ch. xiii.) says that of the great men of modern times Scaliger and Cardan each claimed the possession of a guardian spirit, and hints that Scaliger may have been moved to make this claim in order not to be outdone by his great antagonist. It should, however, be remembered that Cardan did not seriously assert this belief till long after his controversy with Scaliger. Naude sums up thus: "D'ou l'on peut juger asseurement, que lui et Scaliger n'ont point eu d'autre Genie que la grande doctrine qu'ils s'etoient acquis par leurs veilles, par leurs travaux, et par l'experience qu'ils avoient des choses sur lesquelles venant a elever leur jugement ils jugeoint pertinemment de toutes matieres, et ne laissoient rien echapper qui ne leur fust conneu et manifeste."
[171] Thuanus, ad Annum MDLXXVI, part of the Appendix to the _De Vita Propria_.
[172] Cardan does not seem to have harboured animosity against Scaliger. In the _De Vita Propria_, ch. xlviii. p. 198, he writes: "Julius Caesar Scaliger plures mihi titulos ascribit, quam ego mihi concedi postulassem, appellans _ingenium profundissimum, felicissimum, et incomparabile_."
[173] "Quid tua interest quod quatuor verba adjecerim? an hoc tantum crimen est! quid facerem absens absenti?" Cardan writes on in meditative strain: "Coeterum cum non ignorem maculatos fuisse codices B. Hieronimi, atque aliorum patrum nostrorum, ab his qui aliter sentiebant, erroremque suum auctoritate viri tegere voluerunt: ut ne quis in nostris operibus hallucinetur vel ab aliis decipiatur, sciant omnes me nullibi Theologum agere, nec velle in alienam messem falcem ponere."--_Opera_, tom. i. p. 112.
Johannes Wierus, one of the first rationalists on the subject of witchcraft, has quoted largely from Chapter LXXX of _De Varietate_ in his book _De Praestigiis Daemonum_, in urging his case against the orthodox view.
[174] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 96. "Annus hic est Salutis millesimus quingentesimus ac sexagesimus."
[175] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxx. p. 78.
CHAPTER IX
THE year 1555 may be held to mark the point of time at which Cardan reached the highest point of his fortunes. After a long and bitter struggle with an adverse world he had come out a conqueror, and his rise to fame and opulence, if somewhat slow, had been steady and secure. He longed for wealth, not that he might figure as a rich man, but so that he might win the golden independence which permits a student to prosecute the task which seems to subserve the highest purposes of true learning, and frees him from the irksome battle for daily bread. He loved, indeed, to spend money over beautiful things, and there are few more attractive touches in the picture he draws of himself than the confession of his passion for costly penholders, gems, rare books, vessels of brass and silver, and painted spheres.[176] In this brief season of ease and security, there were no flaming portents in the sky to foretell the cruel stroke of evil fortune which was destined so soon to fall upon him.
Cardan has left a very pathetic sketch of his own miserable
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