254 JEROME CARDAN 



to convict him of quoting authors he had not read, if the 

 least handle for this charge should have been given, but 

 no accusation of the kind is preferred. The story of 

 his life shows him to be full of rough candour and 

 honesty, and unlikely to descend to subterfuge, while 

 his great love of reading and his accurate retentive 

 memory would make easy for him a task which ordinary 

 mortals might well regard as hopeless. 



Those critics who pass judgment on Cardan, taken 

 solely as a Physician or as a Mathematician, will give a 

 presentment more fallacious than imperfect generaliza- 

 tions usually furnish, for in Cardan's case the man, 

 taken as a whole, was incomparably greater than the 

 sum of his parts. Naude" remarks that a man who 

 knows a little of everything, and that little imperfectly, 

 deserves small respect as a citizen of the republic of 

 letters, but Cardan did not belong to this category, as 

 Julius Caesar Scaliger found to his cost. He was not 

 like the bookmen of the revival of learning Poliziano, 

 Valla, or Alberti may stand as examples who after 

 putting on the armour of the learned language and 

 saturating themselves with the litercs humaniores, made 

 excursions into some domain of science for the sake of 

 recreation. Cardan might rather be compared with 

 Varro or Theophrastus in classic, and with Erasmus, 

 Pico, Grotius, or Casaubon in modern times. On this 

 point Naude* indulges in something approaching 

 panegyric. He writes " Investigation will show us that 

 many excelled him in the humanities or in Theology, 

 some even in Mathematics, some in Medicine and in the 

 knowledge of Philosophy, some in Oriental tongues and 

 in either side of Jurisprudence, but where shall we find 

 any one who had mastered so many sciences by himself, 

 who had plumbed so deeply the abysses of learning and 



