JEROME CARDAN 281 



and Laws are built upon Chimeras ; That the greatest 

 and wisest Judges have been Murderers, and the sagest 

 persons Fools, or designing Impostors; I say those 

 that can believe this heap of absurdities, are either 

 more credulous than those whose credulity they repre- 

 hend ; or else have some extraordinary evidence of their 

 perswasion, viz. : That it is absurd and impossible that 

 there should be a Witch or Apparition." l Cardan's argu- 

 ment in the case of the sick woman, that it would be diffi- 

 cult if not impossible to invent cause for her cure, other 

 than the power of imagination or Demoniac agency, if 

 less emphatic and lengthy than Glanvil's, certainly runs 

 upon parallel lines therewith, and suggests, if it does not 

 proclaim, the existence of such a thing as the credulity 

 of unbelief ; in other words that those who were disposed 

 to brush aside the alternative causes of the cure as set 

 down by him, and search for others, and put faith in 

 them, would be fully as credulous as those who held the 

 belief which he recorded as his own. 



1 Sadducismus Triumphatus (Ed. 1682), p. 4. 



