PREFACE. v 



the common feeling with regard to him : " Brlicker 

 regrets with reason that nobody has written his life with 



exactitude The wide scope of my own argument 



does not permit me to make any minute researches ; I can 

 only say what will be enough to give some notion of this 

 most rare man. In the account that he gives of his own 

 character, he attributes to himself inclinations that it would 

 seem impossible to have co-existing in a single character, 

 and at the same time he speaks so much evil of himself, 

 that by this only one may see how strange a man he was. 

 .... Whoever would suppose that a man foolishly lost 

 behind judicial astrology .... a man more credulous 

 over dreams than any silly girl, observing them scrupu- 

 lously in himself and others a man who believed that he 

 had the friendship of a Demon, who by marvellous signs 

 warned him of perils a man who himself saw and heard 

 things never heard or seen by any other man a man, in 

 short, of whom, if we read only certain of his works, we 

 may say that he was the greatest fool who ever lived 

 who would suppose, I say, that such a man was at the 

 same time one of the profoundest and most fertile 

 geniuses that Italy has produced, and that he made rare 

 and precious discoveries in mathematics and in medi- 

 cine? Nevertheless; such was Cardan by the con- 



