JEROME CARDAN 105 



ception of a treatise dealing with the Cosmos, but 

 during the course of its preparation a vast mass of 

 subsidiary and contingent knowledge accumulated in 

 his note-books, and rendered necessary the publication 

 of a supplementary work, the De Varietate?- which, by 

 the time it was finished, had grown to a bulk exceeding 

 that of the original treatise. The seminal ideas which 

 germinated and produced such a vast harvest of printed 

 words, were substantially the same which had possessed 

 the brains of Paracelsus and Agrippa. Cardan postu- 

 lates in the beginning a certain sympathy between the 

 celestial bodies and our own, not merely general, but 

 distributive, the sun being in harmony with the heart, 

 and the moon with the animal humours. He considers 

 that all organized bodies are animated, so that what we 

 call the Spirit of Nature is present everywhere. Beyond 

 this everything is ruled by the properties of numbers. 2 

 Heat and moisture are the only real qualities in Nature, 

 the first being the formal, and the second the material, 

 cause of all things; these conceptions he gleaned 

 probably from some criticisms of Aristotle on the 

 archaic doctrines of Heraclitus and Thales as to the 

 origin of the universe. 



It is no marvel that a writer, gifted with so bizarre and 

 imaginative a temper, so restless and greedy of know- 

 ledge, sitting down to work with such a projection 

 before him, should have produced the richest, and at 



1 " Libros de Rerum varietate anno MDLVIII edidi : erant enim 

 reliquiae librorum de subtilitate." De Vita Propria^ p. 176. " Rever- 

 sus in patriam, perfeci libros XVII de Rerum varietate quos jampri- 

 dem inchoaveram." Opera, torn. i. p. no. He had collected much 

 material during his life at Gallarate. 



2 Aristotle, Metaphysics^ book I. ch. v., contains an examination 

 of the Pythagorean doctrine which maintains Number to be the 

 substance of all things: a\\' auro TO direipov KUI avro ro sv ovffiav 

 dvai TOVTUV av icarijyopouvrai. 



