days, unless he receives an
attestation that the sick man has made fresh confession of his sins."[228]
Cardan, with his irritable temper, may very likely have treated this
regulation as an unwarrantable interference with his profession, and have
paid no attention to it. Again, he evidently followed Hippocrates in
rejecting the supernatural origin of disease; a position greatly in
advance of that held by certain of the leading physiologists of the
time.[229] Thus in more ways than one he may have laid himself open to
some charge of disrespect shown to religion or to the spiritual powers.
The absence of any other specific accusation and the circumstances of his
incarceration, taken in conjunction with the foregoing considerations,
almost compel the conclusion that his arrest and imprisonment in 1570 were
brought about by a charge of impiety whispered by some envious tongue
which will never now be identified. The sanction given by the authorities
of the Church to his writings in 1562, operated without doubt to mitigate
the punishment which fell upon him, and suffered him, after due purgation
of his offences, to enjoy for the residue of his days a life comparatively
quiet and prosperous under the patronage of Pius V.

Though he was let out of prison he was not yet a free man. For some twelve
weeks longer he remained a prisoner in his own house, the bond for
eighteen hundred gold crowns having doubtless been given on this account.
Almost his last reflection about his life at Bologna is one in which he
records his satisfaction that all the men who plotted against him there
met their death soon after their attempt, thus sharing the fate of his
enemies at Milan and Pavia. If he is to be believed in this matter, the
Fates, though they might not shield him from attack, proved themselves to
be diligent and remorseless avengers of his wrongs. At the end of
September he turned his back upon Bologna and the cold hospitality it had
given him, and set forth on his last journey. He travelled by easy stages,
and entered Rome on October 7, 1571, the day upon which Don John of
Austria annihilated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto.

There are evidences in his later writings beyond those already cited, that
Cardan's views on religion had undergone change during his sojourn at
Bologna. It was the custom, even with theologians of the time, to
illustrate freely from the classics, wherefore the spectacle of the names
of the great men of Greek and Ro