Jerome Cardan by William George Waters (ebook reader library TXT) 📖

already made mention, a weakness known to my genius alone, a manifestation which served to simulate a trembling of the bed."

Cardan writes at length to show that the mysterious knocking which he and Rodolfo Sylvestro had heard during his imprisonment at Bologna, the peasant who entered his bed-chamber saying "_Te sin casa_," and divers other manifestations, going back as far as 1531--croaking of ravens, barking of dogs, and the ignition of fire-wood--must all have been brought about by the working of this powerful spirit. In 1570 there happened to him one of his everyday experiences of the presence of supernatural powers. In the middle of the night he was conscious of some presence walking about the room. It sat down beside him, and at the same time a loud noise arose from a chest which stood near. This phenomenon, he admits, might well have been the figment of a brain overburdened with thought; but suddenly his memory flies back to an experience of his twentieth year, upon which he proceeds to build a story, wild and fanciful even for his powers of imagination. "What man was it," he asks, "who sold me that copy of Apuleius when I was in my twentieth year, and forthwith went away? I indeed, at that time, had made only one essay in the literary arena, and had no knowledge of the Latin tongue; but in spite of this, and because the book had a gilded cover, I was imprudent enough to buy it. The very next day I found myself just as well versed in Latin as I am now. Moreover, almost at the same time I acquired knowledge of Greek and Spanish and French, sufficient for reading books written in these languages."

Cardan was by this time completely possessed by the belief in his attendant genius, and the flash of memory which recalled the purchase of some book or other in his youth, suggested likewise the attribution of certain mystic powers to this guardian genius, and conjured up some fanciful explanation as to the way these powers had been exercised upon himself; he, the person most closely concerned, being entirely unconscious of their operation at the time when they first affected him. This recorded belief in a gift of tongues is one of the most convincing bits of evidence to be gleaned from Cardan's writings of the insanity which undoubtedly afflicted him, at least periodically, at this crisis of his life.

FOOTNOTES:

[221] He mentions this matter briefly in the _De Vita Propria_: "Bis arsisset lectus, praedixi me non permansurum Bononiae, et prima vice restiti, secunda non potui."--ch. xli. p. 151. A fuller account of it is in _Opera_, tom. x. p. 464.

[222] _Opera_, tom. x. p. 464.

[223] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxx. p. 80. He seems to have had many untoward experiences in driving. He tells of another mishap (_Opera_, tom. i. p. 472) in June 1570; how a fellow, some tipstaff of the courts, jumped into his carriage and frightened the mares Cardan was driving, jeering at them likewise because they were rather bare of flesh.

[224] "Demum sub conductionis fine, voces sparserunt, et maxime apud Moronum Cardinalem, me exiguo auditorio profiteri, quod quanquam non omnino verum esset, quinimo ab initio Academiae multos, et usque ad dies jejunii haberem auditores."--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xvii. p. 56.

[225] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xvii. p. 57.

[226] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xliii. p. 163.

[227] "Alii multis diebus abstinent cibo, alii igne uruntur, ac ferro secantur, nullum doloris vestigium preferentes; multi sunt vocem e pectore mittentes, qui olim engastrimuthi dicebantur; hoc autem maxime eis contingit cum orgia quaedam exercent, atque circumferuntur in orbem. Quae tria ut verissima sunt et naturali ratione mira tamen constant, cujus superius mentionem fecimus, ita illud confictum nasci pueros e mulieribus absque concubitu."--_De Subtilitate_, p. 353.

[228] Ranke, _History of the Popes_, vol. i. p. 246.

[229] Mr. Stephen Paget in his life of Ambroise Pare, the great contemporary French surgeon, gives an interesting account of Pare's beliefs on the divine cause of the plague, p. 269.

[230] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxii. p. 63.

[231] "Multa de daemonibus narrabat, quae quam vera essent nescio."--_De Utilitate_, p. 348.

[232] _De Varietate_, p. 351.

[233] _Ibid.,_ p. 658.

[234] In his counsel to his children, he writes: "Do not believe that you hear demons speak to you, or that you behold the dead. Seek not to learn the truth of these things, for they are amongst the things which are hidden from us."

[235] Cardan alludes to Niger in _De Varietate_, p. 641: "Referebat aliquando Josephus Niger harum rerum maxime peritus, daemonem pueris se sub forma Christi ostendisse, petiisseque ut adoraretur."

[236] _De Subtilitate_, p. 530.

[237] "Nolim ego ad trutinam haec sectari, velut Porphyrius, Psellus, Plotinus, Proclus, Jamblicus, qui copiose de his quae non videre, velut historiam natae rei scripserunt."--_De Subtilitate_, p. 540.

[238] _Opera_, tom. i. 672.


CHAPTER XIII

AFTER the accusation brought against him at Milan in 1562, Cardan had been prohibited from teaching or lecturing in that city, and similar disabilities had followed his recent imprisonment at Bologna. At Rome no duties of this kind awaited him, so he had full time to follow his physician's calling after taking up his residence there. He records the cure of a noble matron, Clementina Massa, and of Cesare Buontempo, a jurisconsult, both of whom had been suffering for nearly two years. The circumstances of his retirement from Bologna would not affect his reputation as a physician, and he seems to have had in Rome as many or even more patients than he cared to treat; and in writing in general terms concerning his successes as a healer, he says: "In all, I restored to health more than a hundred patients, given up as incurable in Milan, in Bologna, and in Rome." Of all the friends Cardan had in this closing period of his life, none was more useful or benevolent than Cardinal Alciati, who, although he had been secretary to Pius IV., contrived to retain the favour of his successor. This piece of good fortune Alciati owed to the protection of Carlo Borromeo, who had been his pupil at Pavia, and had procured for him from Pius IV. a bishopric, a cardinal's hat, and the secretaryship of Dataria. Another of Cardan's powerful friends was the Prince of Matellica, of whom he speaks in terms of praise inflated enough to be ridiculous, were it not for the accompanying note of pathos. After celebrating the almost divine character of this nobleman, his munificence and his superhuman abilities, he goes on: "What could there be in me to win the kindly notice of such a patron? Certainly I had done him no service, nor could he hope I should ever do him any in the future, I, an old man, an outcast of fortune, and prostrated by calamity. In sooth, there was naught about me to attract him; if indeed he found any merit in me, it must have been my uprightness."

Powerful friends are never superfluous, and Cardan seems to have needed them in Rome as much as in Bologna. In 1573 he again hints at plots against his life, but almost immediately after recording his suspicions he goes on to suggest that his danger had arisen chiefly from his ignorance of the streets of Rome, and from the uncouth manners of the populace. "Many physicians, more cautious than myself, and better versed in the customs of the place, have come by their death from similar cause." The danger, whatever its nature, seems to have threatened him as a member of the practising faculty at Rome rather than as the persecuted ex-teacher of Pavia and Bologna. Rodolfo Sylvestro was not the only one of his former associates near him in his old age, for he notes that Simone Sosia, who had been his _famulus_ at Pavia in 1562, was still in his service at Rome.

In reviewing the machinations of his enemies to bring about his dismissal from the Professorship at Bologna, Cardan indulges in the reflection that these men unwillingly did him good service, that is, they procured him leisure which he might use in the completion of his unfinished works, and in the construction of fresh monuments which he proposed to build up out of the vast store of material accumulated in his industrious brain. The literary record of his life in Rome shows that this was no vain saying. He was at work on the later chapters of the _De Vita Propria_ up to the last weeks of his life; and, scattered about these, there are records of his work of correction and revising. While telling of the books he has lately been engaged with, he wanders off in the same sentence to talk of the dream which urged him to write the _De Subtilitate_, and of the execution of the _Commentarii in Ptolomaeum_, during his voyage down the Loire. In 1573 he seems to have found the mass of undigested work more than he could bear to behold; for, after making extracts of such matter as he deemed worth keeping, he consigned to the flames no less than a hundred and twenty of his manuscripts.[239] Before leaving Bologna he had put into shape the _Proxenata_, a lengthy collection of hints, maxims, and reflections as to everyday life; he had re-edited the _Liber Artis Magnae_, and had added thereto the treatise _De Proportionibus_, and the _Regula Aliza_. He also took in hand two books on Geometry, and one on Music, and this last he completed in 1574. On November 16, 1574, he records that he is at that moment writing an explanation of the more abstruse works of Hippocrates, but that he is yet far from the end of his task.

In the _De Libris Propriis_ he gives a list of all his published works, and likewise a table of the same arranged in the order in which they ought to be read. He apologizes for the imperfect state in which some of them are left, and declares that the sight of his unfinished tasks never fails to awaken in his breast a bitter sense of resentment over that loss which he had never ceased to mourn. "At one time I hoped," he writes, "that these works would be corrected by my son, but this favour you see has been denied to me. The desire of my enemies was not to make an end of him, but of me; not by gentle means, in sooth, but by cruel open murder; to let me fall in the very blood of my son." It is somewhat remarkable that in this matter Cardan was destined to suffer a disappointment similar to that which he himself brought upon his own father by refusing to qualify himself to become the commentator on Archbishop Peckham's _Perspectiva_. He next gives the names of all those who had commended him in their works, and finds a special cause for gratification in the fact that, out of the long list set down, only four or five were known to him personally, and these not intimately. There is, however, another short list of censors; and of these he affirms that a certain Brodeus alone is worthy of respect. Of Buteon, who criticized the treatise on _Arithmetic_, he says: "_Est plane stultus et elleboro indiget._" Tartaglia's name is there, and he, according to Cardan, was forced to eat his words; "but he was ashamed to do what he promised, and unwilling to blot out what he had written. He went on in his wrong-headed course, living upon the labour of other men like a greedy crow, a manifest robber of other men's wealth of study; so impudent that he published as his own, in the Italian