Jerome Cardan, William George Waters [reading list TXT] 📗

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: eidola], 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, haemorrhoids, 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 Naude, 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. Naude 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 Caesar 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 _literae 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 Naude 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 Magnae_, the _Practica Arithmeticae_, 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