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In this affair evidence was led to prove a story as common as that of 'levitation' namely, the mysterious throwing or falling of stones in a haunted house, or around the person of a patient bewitched. Cardan is expansive about this manifestation. The patient was Mary Longdon, the witch was Florence Newton of Youghal.
Erasmus he had attacked for venturing to throw doubts upon the suitability of Cicero's Latin as a vehicle of modern thought; this quarrel was over a question of form; and now Scaliger went a step farther, and, albeit he knew little of the subject in hand, published a book of Esoteric Exercitations to show that the De Subtilitate of Cardan was nothing but a tissue of nonsense.
De Subtilitate, p. 540. Opera, tom. i. 672. 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.
Gassendi adds that while Cardan pretended to describe the fates of his children in his voluminous commentaries, he all the while never suspected, from the rules of his great art, that his dearest son would be condemned in the flower of his youth to be beheaded on a scaffold, by an executioner of justice, for destroying his own wife by poison.
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.
For, even if Cardan living should have been a terror to me, I, who am but a single unit in the republic of letters, ought to have postponed my own and singular convenience to the common good, seeing how excellent were the merits of this man, in every sort of learning.
Cardan had now achieved European fame, and was apparently on the high road to fortune, but on the very threshold of his triumph a great sorrow and misfortune befell him, the full effect of which he did not experience all at once. In the closing days of 1546 he lost his wife.
Great if he could lay claim to no other excellence than this; and forsooth, when we come to consider the quickness of his wit, his fiery energy in everything he undertook, whether of the least or the greatest moment, his laborious diligence and unconquerable steadfastness, I affirm that the man who shall venture to compare himself with Cardan may well be regarded as one lacking in all due modesty.
After pointing out to Cardan the blunders aforesaid, he concludes: "The whole of this work of yours is ridiculous and inaccurate, a performance which makes me tremble for your good name." Every succeeding page of Tartaglia's notes shows more and more clearly that he was smarting under a sense of his own folly in having divulged his secret.
Yet, though he accepted us at our face value, and began to talk of his strange discoveries there was none of the old familiar prating about matrix and flux, elixir, magisterium, magnum opus, the mastery and the quintessence, those alternate names for the philosopher's stone which Paracelsus, Simon Forman, Jerome Cardan, and the other medieval worthies indulged in.
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