man letters, scattered thickly about the
pages of any book, would not prove or even suggest unorthodoxy. Cardan
quotes Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus twenty times for any saint in the
Calendar. He does not mention the Virgin more than once or twice in the
whole of the _De Vita Propria_; and, in discoursing on the immortality of
the soul, he cites the opinion of Avicenna, but makes no mention of either
saint or father.[230] The world of classic thought was immeasurably nearer
and more real to Cardan than it can be to any modern dweller beyond the
Alps: to him there had been no solution of continuity between classic
times and his own. When he sat down to write in the _Theonoston_ his
meditations on the death of his son, in the vain hope of reaping
consolation therefrom, he invoked the golden rule of Plotinus, which lays
down that the future is foreseen and arranged by the gods. Being thus
arranged, it must needs be just, for God is the highest expression of
justice. Against a fate thus settled for us we have no right to complain,
lest we should seem to be setting ourselves into opposition to God's will.
Here, although he writes in the spirit of a Christian, the authority cited
is that of a heathen philosopher, and the form of his meditations is taken
rather from Seneca than from father or schoolman. The devotional bias of
Cardan's nature seems to have been strengthened temporarily by the
terrible experiences of Gian Battista's trial and death; but in the course
of his residence at Bologna a marked reaction set in, and the fervent
religious outburst, in which he sought consolation during his intolerable
sorrow, was succeeded by a calmer mood which regarded the necessary evils
of life as transitory accidents, and death as the one and certain end of
sorrow, and perhaps of consciousness as well. What he wrote during his
residence in Rome he kept in manuscript; his recent experience at Bologna
warned him that, living under the shadow of the Vatican with Pius V. as
the ruler thereof, it behoved him to walk as an obedient son of the
Church.

Cardan went first to live in the Piazza di San Girolamo, not far from the
Porto del Popolo, but subsequently he lived in a house in the Via Giulia
near the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato, where probably he died. He
had not long been settled in Rome before he was able to add a fresh
supernatural experience to his already overburdened list. In the month of
August 1572 he was lying awake on