ing driven home by references to
Cardan's alleged miraculous comprehension of the classic tongues in a
single night, and his pretended knowledge of a cure for phthisis. There is
no need to follow Naude farther in his diatribe against the faults and
imperfections, real and apparent, of Cardan's character; these must be
visible enough to the most cursory student. Passages like these arouse
the suspicion that Naude knew books better than men, that at any rate he
did not realize that men are to be found, and not seldom, who take
pleasure in magnifying their foibles into gigantic follies, and their
peccadilloes into atrocious crimes; while the rarity is to come across one
who will set down these details with the circumstantiality used by Cardan.
There is one defect in the _De Vita Propria_--an artistic one--which Naude
does not notice, namely, that in his narrative of his early days Cardan
often over-reaches himself. His show of extreme accuracy destroys the
perspective of the story, and, in his anxiety to be minute over the
sequence of his childish ailments, the most trivial details of his uneasy
dreams, and the cuffs he got from his father and his Aunt Margaret, he
confuses the reader with multitudinous particulars and ceases to be
dramatic. But the hallucinations which he nourished about himself were not
all the outcome of senility. In the _De Varietate_, the work upon which he
spent the greatest care, and the product moreover of his golden prime, he
gives an account of four marvellous properties with which he was
gifted.[248] The first of these was the power to pass, whenever the whim
seized him, from sense into a kind of ecstasy. While he was in this state
he could hear but faintly the sound of voices, and could not distinguish
spoken words. Whether he would be sensitive to any great pain he could not
say, but twitchings and the sharpest attacks of gout affected him not.
When he fell into this state he felt a certain separation about the heart,
as if his soul were departing from that region and taking possession of
his whole body, a door being opened for the passage of the same. The
sensation would begin in the cerebellum, and thence would be diffused
along the spine. The one thing of which he was fully conscious, was that
he had passed out of himself. The second property was that, when he would,
he could conjure up any images he liked before his eyes, real [Greek:
eidola], and not at all to be compared with the blurred pr