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Updated: June 18, 2025
It is not wonderful that the Archbishop, who doubtless heard all about Cardan's asserted cure of phthisis from Cassanate, should have been eager to submit his asthma to Cardan's skill.
As the attack threatened to be a serious one, Della Croce recommended that another physician, Ambrogio Cavenago, should be called in, but the father, remembering Cardan's cure of Lanza, wished for him as well.
Though the Paralipomena were locked in his desk, it is almost certain that the spirit with which they were inspired would have infected Cardan's brain, and prompted him to repeat in words the views on religion and a future state which he had already put on paper, for he rarely let discretion interfere with the enunciation of any opinion he favoured.
The De Subtilitate represents Cardan's original conception of a treatise dealing with the Cosmos, but during the course of its preparation a vast mass of subsidiary and contingent knowledge accumulated in his note-books, and rendered necessary the publication of a supplementary work, the De Varietate, which, by the time it was finished, had grown to a bulk exceeding that of the original treatise.
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.
But all through this book it is very difficult to determine whether the propositions advanced are Cardan's own, or those of the Greek and Arabian writers he quotes so freely: and this charge of Scaliger, which is the best supported of all, goes very little way to convict him of impiety.
The boy and his new protector could not exchange a word, and only managed to make each other understand by signs, and that very imperfectly. But the boy was not to be shaken off. He persisted in following his venture to the end, and arrived in Cardan's train at Milan, where he was allowed to go his own way. The only care for his training Cardan took was to have him taught music.
In any case, Aldo went on from bad to worse; at one time his father found it necessary to place him under restraint, and the last record of him is that one in Cardan's testament, by which he was disinherited. Gian Battista's failings were doubtless grave and numerous, but he had at least sufficient industry to qualify himself as a physician.
At dinner-time, he went into the room of a friend, whom he found lost in the utmost astonishment. A huge book, Cardan's De Subtilitate, had flown at him across the room, and the leaves had turned, under invisible fingers! There are plenty of bogles in that book.
Our COLLINS and COWPER were often thrown into that extraordinary state of mind, when the ideal presence converts us into visionaries; and their illusions were as strong as SEEDENBORG'S, who saw a terrestrial heaven in the glittering streets of his New Jerusalem; or JACOB BEHMEN'S, who listened to a celestial voice till he beheld the apparition of an angel; or CARDAN'S, when he so carefully observed a number of little armed men at his feet; or BENVENUTO CELLINI'S, whose vivid imagination and glorious egotism so frequently contemplated "a resplendent light hovering over his shadow."
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