THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 291 



indeed deplorable, and we excel that period in wisdom 

 by the sum of all experience that has been since acquired. 

 Yet we should know that it was then possible to boast not 

 less loudly or less justly than we now boast in our day of 

 railways and electric telegraphs, and to believe that intel- 

 lect had few more triumphs to achieve. " We should 

 exult 1 ," said Cardan, writing in this vein " we should 

 exult in a field covered with blossom. For what is more 

 wonderful than pyrotechny or the thunderbolt aimed by 

 the hands of mortals, which is more devastating than the 

 thunder of celestial beings ? Nor will I be silent con- 

 cerning thee, great magnet, by whom we are led through 

 the vastest seas in the darkness of night, through fearful 

 storms, into strange, unknown regions. Add also the in- 

 vention of typography, achieved by mortal handicraft and 

 heavenly wit, rival to the divine miracles, and what more 

 is there to be done unless we occupy the heavens ?" 



Again we should remember, if we would do justice 

 not to his age only, but also to Jerome himself, that the 

 strange combination in one character of high intellectual 

 endowment with superstitions of incredible absurdity 

 the kind of mixture we have noticed in Cardan was 

 common among the foremost men of all that time. Kepler 

 himself, like Cardan, cast nativities ; Tycho Brahe kept 

 an idiot, whose mouthings he received as revelations from 



1 De Vita Propriti, cap. xlr. 

 u2 



