294 JEROME CARDAN 



more to enable man to scale the very heavens. With 

 his mind thus set upon the exploration of these new 

 fields of knowledge ; with the full realization how vast 

 was the treasure lying hid therein ; it was only natural 

 that a spirit so curious and greedy of fresh mental food 

 should have fretted at the piteous brevity of the earthly 

 term allowed to man, and have rated as a supreme evil 

 that old age which brought with it decay of the faculties 

 and foreshadowed the speedy and inevitable fall of the 

 curtain. Cicero on the other hand had been nurtured in 

 a creed and philosophy alike outworn. The blight 

 of finality had fallen upon the moral world, and the 

 physical universe still guarded jealously her mighty 

 secrets. To the eyes of Cicero the mirror of nature was 

 blank void and darkness, while Cardan, gazing into the 

 same glass, must have been embarrassed with the 

 number and variety of the subjects offered, and may 

 well have felt that the longest life of man ten times 

 prolonged would rank but as a moment in that Titanic 

 spell of work necessary to bring to the birth the teeming 

 burden with which the universe lay in travail. Here is 

 one and perhaps the strongest reason of his hatred of 

 old age ; because through the shortness of his span of 

 time he could only deal with a grain or two of the sand 

 lying upon the shores of knowledge. Cicero, with his 

 more limited vision, conscious that sixty years or so of 

 life would exhaust every physical delight, and blunt and 

 mar the intellectual ; ignorant both of the world of new 

 light lying beyond the void, and of the rapture which 

 the conquering investigator of the same must feel in 

 wringing forth its secrets, welcomed the gathering 

 shades as friendly visitants, a mood which has asserted 

 itself in later times with certain weary spirits, sated with 



