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

also from the origin of urine: and finally, he excited a palpitation of the heart and a ringing in the ears.
But in vain, for not even all these things could be enough
for Cardano, so that in chapter 47
of his own life he should say, "I have long been persuaded that a good and merciful spirit was with me, but for what reason he might make me more certain of imminent things, I could not discover until the seventy-fourth year of my life was completed, while I undertook to write my life."
Indeed, not even then could he know that in any way,
if that whole narrative about the favor of the Divine
is not only vain and ridiculous, but plainly
fabricated, as Cardano himself is witness
and arbiter in his own cause: for in book 16
of "On Variety," chapter 93, he denies that he ever had any
Genius. "I certainly do not know that any Demon or
Genius is present to me": and he adds later,
"That I know well, that reason has been given to me in place of a good Genius, and great patience in labors, a good mind, and a contempt for money and honors, all of which I value highly, and consider them to be gifts better and more ample than the Demon of Socrates."
With this confession, therefore—free and worthy of an ingenuous man—that heap of inanities collapses, which Cardano, when he was not so much in control of himself, brought forth into the public theater to be laughed at, concerning his familiar spirit, about splendor, about specters, and the sight of the Moon at high noon, and similar trifles and lies.
Indeed, that he was not always in control of himself, but was carried away by a certain heat, is indicated by the most certain evidence of all: that variety of opinions conflicting with each other, which no one should persuade himself were brought forth by him through forgetfulness of what he had already said, or by cunning and craftiness, since in other matters he proved himself to be a miracle of memory; and it elevates all suspicion of art and craftiness that he would speak of great things, indeed, but always contrary, and never connected and mutually coherent.
But if anyone wishes to attribute that heat and warmth, so varied and unequal, by which great minds are sometimes agitated, and with which, as it gradually cools, they themselves usually either marvel or no longer understand in the manner in which they were said at the time, to the presence of some Genius, he surely makes a great entry for credulous and superstitious men, so that they may grant similar Geniuses to Socrates, Plotinus, Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Caesar, Synesius, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Cecco d'Ascoli, and even to Julius Scaliger and countless others, who, either led by ambition or nurtured in the schools of the Platonists and Kabbalists, attribute that to their Geniuses, in which they should more quickly marvel at and value the sublimity of their own nature.
But few see what is right, or do not serve their own passions.
And I wish that they were not of that number who, because of similar trifles and follies, judge the life of miserable men, well and auspiciously indeed, if they assert that they participated in the conversations of gods, and musical and heavenly delights, but badly and ominously, if they mingled with the dances and banquets of demons, due to the vice of a damaged imagination in both cases.
And indeed, I have occupied myself all the more willingly in explaining this lie of Cardano concerning his Genius, or—what I would more willingly say—this raving, because I hope that a great addition of a good mind will result from it for all demonologists, so that they may not be carried with such precipitous

censure against those whom uncertain or vain rumor reports to have lived addicted to the company of demons: since Girolamo Cardano, whose example is especially brought forward against those accused of such wickedness, after those solemn abjurations which we have brought forward, has absolutely nothing concerning his Genius which could be prejudicial to those miserable and mostly foolish little men.
But because I do not want to make their quarrel my own, I finally return here, that I may conclude that Cardano, from a certain intemperance of a mind that was never equal and composed, did many absurd things and spoke in a way that was not at all consistent with himself in all things.
For it is known that all melancholics—of which kind I have no doubt he was—are proud, and too much flatter themselves, and are elated, because when melancholy is vaporous, those winds make airy temperaments, and they burn with a desire for great things, such as name, honors, and authority; they are, besides, suspicious, morose, envious, malevolent, tenacious of feuds, and cruel, astorgoi without affection, like Timon, Cato, and Diogenes, and placed as if on the extreme border of human nature, so that they may receive the Celestial, or the Bestial, or sometimes one mixed from both, from the slightest impulse.
It follows now that we examine how great or of what nature Cardano's learning was; in which matter, I understand that I must not act in the manner of those who never look at Cardano in his entirety, nor do they estimate him from the immense volumes which he left to us in almost every kind of science, but only from his medical or mathematical works.
For since men have been accustomed to divide the greatest minds into two parts, as far as the present undertaking is concerned: the first and lowest, in my judgment, is that of those who, enslaved to a certain faculty separated from others and as if solitary, have exercised themselves in cultivating it so that, for that reason, they are held worthy to be able to precede all others by their merit: thus Euclid, Pappus, Archimedes, Vieta, and Galileo in mathematics; Ptolemy, Tycho, Copernicus, and Gassendi in astronomy; Plato, Aristotle, Albert, Pomponatius, Cremoninus, and Licetus in philosophy; Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Fernel, Duret, Riolan, and Moreau in medical dissertations hold the first place, with no one disagreeing, and unless my conjecture deceives me, they will retain the same, well-preserved and secure, through the course of succeeding ages: because nothing is more difficult in the sciences than to cast down from the bridge, as if they were old men now exhausted and worn out, those highest men who fortified a path for themselves to their summit by their own labors.
The second and supreme difference of minds embraces those men who, by a greater privilege of a kinder nature, are not fixed and addicted to one science alone, like a polypus to a rock, but roam more or less through their circle, just as from those:

Those whom foreign things delight, to dwell in their own is burdensome.
some are accustomed to travel through Germany and Italy; some, furthermore, to visit Spain and England, and the whole of Europe; others, finally, like Drake, are accustomed to circumnavigate the entire globe.