292 JEROME CARDAN 



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. 1 



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 

 1 De Utilitate, book ii. ch. 4. 



