Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study

by W. G. Waters

Two or three of Cardan's treatises are in the materna lingua, but he wrote almost entirely in Latin, using a style which was emphatically literary.[286] His Latin is probably above the average excellence of the age, and if the classic writers held the first place in his estimation—as naturally they would—he assuredly did not neglect the firstfruits of modern literature. Pulci was his favourite poet. He evidently knew Dante and Boccaccio well, and his literary insight was clear enough to perceive that the future belonged to those who should write in the vulgar tongue of the lands which produced them.[287]

Perhaps it was impossible that a man endowed with so catholic a spirit and with such earnest desire for knowledge, should sink into the mere pedant with whom later ages have been made acquainted through the farther specialization of science. At all events Cardan is an instance that the man of liberal education need not be killed by the man of science. For him the path of learning was not an easy one to tread, and, as it not seldom happens, opposition and coldness drove him on at a pace rarely attained by those for whom the royal road to learning is smoothed and prepared. For a long time his father refused to give him instruction in Latin, or to let him be taught by any one else, and up to his twentieth year he seems to have known next to nothing of this language which held the keys both of letters and science. He began to learn Greek when he was about thirty-five, but it was not till he had turned forty that he took up the study of it in real earnest;[288] and, writing some years later, he gives quotations from a Latin version of Aristotle.[289] In his commentaries on Hippocrates he used a Latin text, presumably the translation of Calvus printed in Rome in 1525, and quotes Epicurus in Latin in the De Subtilitate (p. 347), but in works like the De Sapientia and the De Consolatione he quotes Greek freely, supplying in nearly every case a Latin version of the passages cited. These treatises bristle with quotations, Horace being his favourite author. "Vir in omni sapientiæ genere admirandus."[290] As with many moderns his love for Horace did not grow less as old age crept on, for the De Vita Propria is perhaps fuller of Horatian tags than any other of his works. It would seem somewhat of a paradox that a sombre and earnest nature like Cardan's should find so great pleasure in reading the elegant poco curante triflings of the Augustan singer, were it not a recognized fact that Horace has always been a greater favourite with serious practical Englishmen than with the descendants of those for whom he wrote his verses.

It was a habit with Cardan to apologize in the prefaces of his scientific works for the want of elegance in his Latin, explaining that the baldness and simplicity of his periods arose from his determination to make his meaning plain, and to trouble nothing about style for the time being; but the following passage shows that he had a just and adequate conception of the necessary laws of literary art. "That book is perfect which goes straight to its point in one single line of argument, which neither leaves out aught that is necessary, nor brings in aught that is superfluous: which observes the rule of correct division; which explains what is obscure; and shows plainly the groundwork upon which it is based."[291]

The De Vita Propria from which this extract comes is in point of style one of his weakest books, but even in this volume passages may here and there be found of considerable merit, and Cardan was evidently studious to let his ideas be presented in intelligible form, for he records that in 1535 he read through the whole of Cicero, for the sake of improving his Latin. His style, according to Naudé, held a middle place between the high-flown and the pedestrian, and of all his books the De Utilitate ex Adversis Capienda, which was begun in 1557, shows the nearest approach to elegance, but even this is not free from diffuseness, the fault which Naudé finds in all his writings. Long dissertations entirely alien from the subject in hand are constantly interpolated. In the Practice of Arithmetic he turns aside to treat of the marvellous properties of certain numbers, of the motion of the planets, and of the Tower of Babel; and in the treatise on Dialectic he gives an estimate of the historians and letter-writers of the past. But here Cardan did not sin in ignorance; his poverty and not his will consented to these literary outrages. He was paid for his work by the sheet, and the thicker the volume the higher the pay.[292]

When he made a beginning of the De Utilitate Cardan was at the zenith of his fortunes. He had lately returned from his journey to Scotland, having made a triumphant progress through the cities of Western Europe. Thus, with his mind well stored with experience of divers lands, his wits sharpened by intercourse with the élite of the learned world, and his hand nerved by the magnetic stimulant of success, he sat down to write as the philosopher and man of the world, rather than as the man of science. He was, in spite of his prosperity, inclined to deal with the more sombre side of life. He seems to have been specially drawn to write of death, disease, and of the peculiar physical misfortune which befell him in early manhood. Like Cicero he goes on to treat of Old Age, but in a spirit so widely different that a brief comparison of the conclusions of the two philosophers will not be without interest. Old age, Cardan declares to be the most cruel and irreparable evil with which man is cursed, and to talk of old age is to talk of the crowning misfortune of humanity. Old men are made wretched by avarice, by dejection, and by terror. He bids men not to be deceived by the flowery words of Cicero,[293] when he describes Cato as an old man, like to a fair statue of Polycleitus, with faculties unimpaired and memory fresh and green. He next goes on to catalogue the numerous vices and deformities of old age, and instances from Aristotle what he considers to be the worst of all its misfortunes, to wit that an old man is well-nigh cut off from hope; and by way of comment grimly adds, "If any man be plagued by the ills of old age he should blame no one but himself, for it is by his own choice that his life has run on so long." He vouchsafes a few words of counsel as to how this hateful season may be robbed of some of its horror. Our bodies grow old first, then our senses, then our minds. Therefore let us store our treasures in that part of us which will hold out longest, as men in a beleaguered city are wont to collect their resources in the citadel, which, albeit it must in the end be taken, will nevertheless be the last to fall into the foeman's hands. Old men should avoid society, seeing that they can bring nothing thereto worth having: whether they speak or keep silent they are in the way, and they are as irksome to themselves when they are silent, as they are to others when they speak. The old man should take a lesson from the lower animals, which are wont to defend themselves with the best arms given them by nature: bulls with their horns, horses with their hoofs, and cats with their claws; wherefore an old man should at least show himself to be as wise as the brutes and maintain his position by his wisdom and knowledge, seeing that all the grace and power of his manhood must needs have fled.[294]

In another of his moral treatises he has formulated a long indictment against old age, that hateful state with its savourless joys and sleepless nights. Did not Zeno the philosopher strangle himself when he found that time refused to do its work. The happiest are those who earliest lay down the burden of existence, and the Law itself causes these offenders who are least guilty to die first, letting the more nefarious and hardened criminals stand by and witness the death of their fellows. There can be no evil worse than the daily expectation of the blow that is inevitable, and old age, when it comes, must make every man regret that he did not die in infancy. "When I was a boy," he writes, "I remember one day to have heard my mother, Chiara Micheria—herself a young woman—cry out that she wished it had been God's will to let her die when she was a child. I asked her why, and she answered: 'Because I know I must soon die, to the great peril of my soul, and besides this, if we shall diligently weigh and examine all our experiences of life, we shall not light upon a single one which will not have brought us more sorrow than joy. For afflictions when they come mar the recollection of our pleasures, and with just cause; for what is there in life worthy the name of delight, the ever-present burden of existence, the task of dressing and undressing every day, hunger, thirst, evil dreams? What more profit and ease have we than the dead? We must endure the heat of summer, the cold of winter, the confusion of the times, the dread of war, the stern rule of parents, the anxious care of our children, the weariness of domestic life, the ill carriage of servants, lawsuits, and, what is worst of all, the state of the public mind which holds probity as silliness; which practises deceit and calls it prudence. Craftsmen are counted excellent, not by their skill in their art, but by reason of their garish work and of the valueless approbation of the mob. Wherefore one must needs either incur God's displeasure or live in misery, despised and persecuted by men.'"[295] These words, though put into his mother's mouth, are manifestly an expression of Cardan's own feelings.

Cardan was the product of an age to which there had recently been revealed the august sources from which knowledge, as we understand the term, has flowed without haste or rest since the unsealing of the fountain. He counts it rare fortune to have been born in such an age, and rhapsodizes over the flowery meadow of knowledge in which his generation rejoices, and over the vast Western world recently made known. Are not the artificial thunderbolts of man far more destructive than those of heaven? What praise is too high for the magnet which leads men safely over perilous seas, or for the art of printing? Indeed it needs but little more to enable man to scale the very heavens. With his mind thus set upon the exploration of these new fields of knowledge; with the full realization how vast was the treasure lying hid therein; it was only natural that a spirit so curious and greedy of fresh mental food should have fretted at the piteous brevity of the earthly term allowed to man, and have rated as a supreme evil that old age which brought with it decay of the faculties and foreshadowed the speedy and inevitable fall of the curtain. Cicero on the other hand had been nurtured in a creed and philosophy alike outworn. The blight of finality had fallen upon the moral world, and the physical universe still guarded jealously her mighty secrets. To the eyes of Cicero the mirror of nature was blank void and darkness, while Cardan, gazing into the same glass, must have been embarrassed with the number and variety of the subjects offered, and may well have felt that the longest life of man ten times prolonged would rank but as a moment in that Titanic spell of work necessary to bring to the birth the teeming burden with which the universe lay in travail. Here is one and perhaps the strongest reason of his hatred of old age; because through the shortness of his span of time he could only deal with a grain or two of the sand lying upon the shores of knowledge. Cicero, with his more limited vision, conscious that sixty years or so of life would exhaust every physical delight, and blunt and mar the intellectual; ignorant both of the world of new light lying beyond the void, and of the rapture which the conquering investigator of the same must feel in wringing forth its secrets, welcomed the gathering shades as friendly visitants, a mood which has asserted itself in later times with certain weary spirits, sated with knowledge as Vitellius was sated with his banquets of nightingales' tongues.

Cardan with all his curiosity and restless mental activity was hampered and restrained in his explorations by the bonds which had been imposed upon thought during the rule of authority. These bonds held him back—acting imperceptibly—as they held back Abelard and many other daring spirits trained in the methods of the schoolmen, and allowed him to do little more than range at large over the fields of fresh knowledge which were destined to be reaped by later workers trained in other schools and under different masters. Learning was still subject to authority, though in milder degree, than when Thomas of Aquino dominated the mental outlook of Europe, and the great majority of the men who posed as Freethinkers, and sincerely believed themselves to be Freethinkers, were unconsciously swayed by the associations of the method of teaching they professed to despise. Their progress for the most part resembled the movement of a squirrel in a rotatory cage, but though their efforts to conquer the new world of knowledge were vain, it cannot be questioned that the restrictions placed around them, while nullifying the result of their investigations, stimulated enormously the activity of the brain and gave it a formal discipline which proved of the highest value when the real literary work of Modern Europe began. The futilities of the problems upon which the scholastic thinkers exercised themselves gave occasion for the satiric onslaught both of Rabelais and Erasmus. "Quæstio subtilissima, utrum Chimæra in vacuo bombinans possit comedere secundas intentiones; et fuit debatuta per decem hebdomadas in Consilio Constantiensi," and "Quid consecrasset Petrus, si consecrasset eo tempore, quo corpus Christi pendebet in cruce?" are samples which will be generally familiar, but the very absurdity of these exercitations serves to prove how strenuous must have been the temper of the times which preferred to exhaust itself over such banalities as are typified by the extracts above written, rather than remain inactive. The dogmas in learning were fixed as definitely as in religion, and the solution of every question was found and duly recorded. The Philosopher was allowed to strike out a new track, but if he valued his life or his ease, he would take care to arrive finally at the conclusion favoured by authority.

Cardan may with justice be classed both with men of science and men of letters. In spite of the limitations just referred to it is certain that as he surveyed the broadening horizon of the world of knowledge, he must have felt the student's spasm of agony when he first realized the infinity of research and the awful brevity of time. His reflections on old age give proof enough of this. If he missed the labour in the full harvest-field, the glimpse of the distant mountain tops, suffused for the first time by the new light, he missed likewise the wearing labour which fell upon the shoulders of those who were compelled by the new philosophy to use new methods in presenting to the world the results of their midnight research. Such work as Cardan undertook in the composition of his moral essays, and in the Commentary on Hippocrates put no heavy tax on the brain or the vital energies; the Commentary was of portentous length, but it was not much more than a paraphrase with his own experiences added thereto. Mathematics were his pastime, to judge by the ease and rapidity with which he solved the problems sent to him by Francesco Sambo of Ravenna and others.[296] He worked hard no doubt, but as a rule mere labour inflicts no heavier penalty than healthy fatigue. The destroyer of vital power and spring is hard work, combined with that unsleeping diligence which must be exercised when a man sets himself to undertake something more complex than the mere accumulation of data, when he is forced to keep his mental powers on the strain through long hours of selection and co-ordination, and to fix and concentrate his energies upon the task of compelling into symmetry the heap of materials lying under his hand. The De Subtilitate and the De Varietate are standing proofs that Cardan did not overstrain his powers by exertion of this kind.

Leaving out of the reckoning his mathematical treatises, the vogue enjoyed by Cardan's published works must have been a short one. They came to the birth only to be buried in the yawning graves which lie open in every library. At the time when Spon brought out his great edition in ten folio volumes in 1663, the mists of oblivion must have been gathering around the author's fame, and in a brief space his words ceased to have any weight in the teaching of that Art he had cultivated with so great zeal and affection. The mathematician who talked about "Cardan's rule" to his pupils was most likely ignorant both of his century and his birthplace. Had it not been for the references made by writers like Burton to his dabblings in occult learning, his claims to read the stars, and to the guidance of a peculiar spirit, his name would have been now unknown, save to a few algebraists; and his desire, expressed in one of the meditative passages of the De Vita Propria, would have been amply fulfilled: "Non tamen unquam concupivi gloriam aut honores: imo sprevi, cuperem notum esse quod sim, non opto ut sciatur qualis sim."[297]