Complete Works, Volume 1: The Book on Games of Chance

because hidden things surpass your grasp, you babble of the cross, the tomb, and hell, you ignorant and petty judge. How calumniously, how foolishly your fairness will pronounce, most ample President; to whose tribunal this case is referred by appeal. In which struggle, with the defendant himself silent, and no advocate defending him—for there is no need—these very books will plead the case.

As for the rest, we frankly admit that Cardanus Cardano, as befits a philosopher, expresses his own opinions most freely everywhere. For although he spent no small part of his life among the masked, he never appears masked himself. And just as he always avoids being a thrall to another's opinion, so he never stupidly admires or craftily hides himself and his own works; he is a man least of all a dissembler of himself; indeed, he is a harsher censor of his own errors and his own life than of another's. Furthermore, with the vastness of his genius, he has encompassed everything in the sciences, which individuals have barely been able to attain one by one. And perhaps he knew too many things, which it is safest to ignore: but he knew those things in order to refute, or execrate, or mock them. It would, however, have been desirable that he had preferred to give reins to his genius, and to cultivate only Physiology natural science, and its sister