JEROME CARDAN 295 



knowledge as Vitellius was sated with his banquets of 

 nightingales' tongues. 



Cardan with all his curiosity and restless mental 

 activity was hampered and restrained in his explorations 

 by the bonds which had been imposed upon thought 

 during the rule of authority. These bonds held him 

 back acting imperceptibly as they held back Abelard 

 and many other daring spirits trained in the methods of 

 the schoolmen, and allowed him to do little more than 

 range at large over the fields of fresh knowledge which 

 were destined to be reaped by later workers trained in 

 other schools and under different masters. Learning 

 was still subject to authority, though in milder degree, 

 than when Thomas of Aquino dominated the mental 

 outlook of Europe, and the great majority of the men 

 who posed as Freethinkers, and sincerely believed them- 

 selves to be Freethinkers, were unconsciously swayed by 

 the associations of the method of teaching they professed 

 to despise. Their progress for the most part resembled 

 the movement of a squirrel in a rotatory cage, but though 

 their efforts to conquer the new world of knowledge 

 were vain, it cannot be questioned that the restrictions 

 placed around them, while nullifying the result of their 

 investigations, stimulated enormously the activity of the 

 brain and gave it a formal discipline which proved of the 

 highest value when the real literary work of Modern 

 Europe began. The futilities of the problems upon 

 which the scholastic thinkers exercised themselves gave 

 occasion for the satiric onslaught both of Rabelais and 

 Erasmus. " Quaestio subtilissima, utrum Chimaera in 

 vacuo bombinans possit comedere secundas intentiones ; 

 et fuit debatuta per decem hebdomadas in Consilio 

 Constantiensi," and "Quid consecrasset Petrus, si 



