At the beginning of the year 1565 Cardan had a narrow escape from death by burning, for his bed from some unknown cause caught fire twice in the same night while he was asleep. The servant was disturbed by the smoke, and having aroused his master, told him what was amiss, whereupon Cardan flew into a violent rage, for he deemed that the youth must be drunk. But he soon perceived the danger, and then they both set to work to extinguish the flames. His own description of the occurrence is highly characteristic. "Having put out the fire, I settled myself again to sleep, and, while I was dreaming of alarms, and that I was flying from some danger, it happened that either these terrifying dreams, or the fire and smoke again aroused me, and, looking around, I found that the bed was once more alight, and the greater part of it consumed. The vari-coloured coverlet, the leather hangings, and all the covering of the bed was unhurt. Thus this great alarm and danger and serious disturbance caused only a trifling loss; less than half of the bed-linen was burnt, but the blankets were entirely consumed. On the first alarm the flames burnt out twice or thrice with little smoke, and caused scarcely any damage. The second time the fire and the mishap forced me to rise just before dawn, the fire lasting altogether about seven hours."

There was naturally a warning sign to be found in this accident.[221] The smoke, Cardan said, denoted disgrace; the fire, peril and fear; the flame, a grave and pressing danger to his life. The smouldering fire signified secret plots which were to be put into execution against him by his servants while he lay in bed. And the fact that he set fire to the bed himself, denoted that he would be able to meet any coming danger alone and without assistance. The indictment against him was foreshadowed by the fire and the flames and the smoke. Poison and assault were not to be feared. Men might indeed ask questions as to what kind of danger it could be which only arose from those about him, and fell short of poison and violence. The fire, he goes on to say, signifies the Magistrate. More than once it seemed to be extinct, but it always revived. Danger seemed to threaten him less from open hostility than from the cunning flattery of foes, and from over-confidence on his own part. His books, which he had lately caused to be printed, appeared to be in grave peril, but a graver one overhung his life. He deemed that he would quit the tribunal condemned by the empty scandal of the crowd, suffering no slight loss, and worsted chiefly through putting faith in false friends, and through his own instability. On the whole, the loss would prove inconsiderable; the danger moderate, but the vexation exceedingly heavy. These results might have sprung from causes other than natural ones; but, on the other hand, such things often come about through chance. They might prove to be a warning to him to keep clear of hostile prejudice, and to make friends of those in authority, care being taken not to let himself become involved in their private affairs, and not to seek too close an acquaintance.[222]

Up to this date, Cardan, when he visited his patients, had either walked or ridden a mule. In 1562 he began to use a carriage, but this change of habit brought ill luck with it, for, in this same year, his horses ran away; he was thrown out of the vehicle, and sustained an injury to one of the fingers of his right hand, and to the right arm as well.[223] The finger soon healed, but the damage to the right arm shifted itself over to the left side, leaving the right arm sound. The foregoing details, taken chiefly from the Paralipomena (Book III. ch. xii.), are somewhat significant in respect to the serious trouble which came upon him soon afterwards.

Though he had now secured a class-room for himself, the malice of his enemies was not yet abated. Just before the end of his term, certain of them went to Cardinal Morone and told him that it would be inexpedient to allow Cardan to retain his Professorship any longer, seeing that scarcely any pupils went to listen to him. The terms Cardan used in describing this hostile movement against him,[224] rouse a suspicion that there may have been some ground for the assertion of his adversaries; but he declares that, at any rate, he had a good many pupils from the beginning of the session up to the time of Lent. He gives no clue whereby the date of this intrigue may be exactly ascertained, but it probably happened near the end of his sojourn at Bologna, because in his account of it he describes likewise the cessation of his public teaching, and makes no mention of any resumption of the same. He declares that he was at last overborne by the multitude of his foes, and their cunning plots. Under the pretence that, in seeking Cardan's removal, they were really acting for his benefit, they succeeded in bringing Cardinal Morone round to their views. Cardan's final words in dealing with this matter help to fix the date of this episode as some time in 1570. Speaking of his enemies, he writes: "Nay indeed they have given me greater leisure for the codification of my books, they have lengthened my days, they have increased my fame, and, by procuring my removal from the work which was too laborious for me, they secured for me the pleasure I now enjoy in the discovery and investigation of divers of the secrets of Nature. Therefore I constantly tell myself that I do not hate these men, nor deem them blameworthy, because they wrought me an ill turn, but because of the malignancy they had in their hearts."[225]

It is almost certain that this removal of Cardan from his office of teacher was part and parcel of a carefully-devised plot against him, and a prelude to more serious trouble in the near future. Early in April 1570 he had occasion to put into writing a certain medical opinion which was to be sent to Cardinal Morone. He describes the episode: "It chanced that one of the sheets of my manuscript fell from the table down upon the floor, and then flew by itself up to the cornice of the room, where it hung, fixed to the woodwork. Greatly amazed, I called for Rodolfo, and pointed out to him this marvel. He did not indeed see it fly up, and at that time I was ignorant as to what it might foretell, for I had no foreboding of the many ills which were about to molest me. But now I see that the meaning of this portent must have been that, after the approaching shipwreck of my fortunes, my bark would be sped along with a more favouring breeze. It was during the month following, unless I am mistaken, that, when I was once more writing a letter to Cardinal Morone, I looked for a certain powder-box which had been missing for some long time, and, when I lifted up a sheet of paper in order to powder it with dust gathered up from the floor of the room, there was the powder-box, hidden beneath the sheet. How could it have come there on the level writing-desk? This sign confirmed the hope I had already conceived of the Cardinal's wisdom and humanity; that he would plead with the Pope, the best of men, in such wise that I should find a prosperous end to my toilsome life."[226]

The blow thus foreshadowed fell on October 6, 1570, when he was suddenly arrested and put under restraint. He speaks of a bond which he gave for eighteen hundred gold crowns; and says that, while he was in hold, all his estate was administered by the civil authorities. Rodolfo Sylvestro was constantly with him during his incarceration, and on January 1, 1571, he was released, just at nightfall, and allowed to return to his own house. While he was in prison in the month of October some mysterious knockings at the door supplied him with a fulfilment and explanation of the portents lately chronicled. The knockings appeared furthermore to warn him of approaching death, and he began to bewail his misery; but, having gathered courage, he heartened himself to face his doom, which could be nothing worse than death. Young men, leaders of armies, courted death in battle to win the favour of their sovereigns; wherefore he, a decrepit old man, might surely await his end with calmness. He then wanders off into a long disquisition on the philosophy of Polybius, and forgets entirely to set down further details of his imprisonment, or to explain the cause thereof.

Pius IV. had died at the end of 1565, and had been succeeded by Michele Ghislieri, the Cardinal of Alessandria, as Pius V. Like his predecessor, the new Pope was a Milanese by birth, but in character and aims the two Popes were entirely different. Pius. V. identified himself completely with the work of the Holy Office, and straightway set in operation all its powers for the extirpation of the heretical opinions which, on account of the easy-going character of the late Pope, had made much progress in Italy, and nowhere more than in Bologna. Von Ranke, in the History of the Popes, gives an extract (vol. i. p. 97) from the compendium of the Inquisitors, which sets forth that "Bologna was in a very perilous state, because there the heretics were especially numerous; amongst them was a certain Gian Battista Rotto, who enjoyed the friendship and support of many persons of weight, such as Morone, Pole, and the Marchesa Pescara (Vittoria Colonna). Rotto made himself very active in collecting money, which he distributed amongst the poor folk of Bologna who were heretics."

It will be remembered that in 1562, while he was waiting in Milan for the appointment as Professor at Bologna, Cardan submitted his books to the Congregation of the Index for approval. He was known to be a fellow-citizen and friend of the reigning Pope: the corpus of his work had by that time reached a portentous size, wherefore it is quite possible that the official readers may have been lenient, or cursory, over their work; but when Pius V., the strenuous ascetic foe of heresy, stepped into the place of the indolent Pius IV., jurist and politician rather than Churchman, it is more than probable that certain amateur inquisitors at Bologna, fully as anxious to work Cardan's ruin as to safeguard the faith, may have busied themselves in hunting through his various works for passages upon which to base a charge of unorthodoxy. Such passages were not hard to find. There was the horoscope of Jesus Christ, which subsequently affronted the piety of De Thou. There was the passage already noticed in which he said such hard things of the Dominicans (De Varietate Rerum, 1557, p. 572). He had indeed disclaimed it, but there it stood unexpunged in the subsequent editions of the book; and, while considering this detail, it may be remarked that Pius V. began his career as a member of the Dominican Order, the practices of which Cardan had impugned. In the first and second editions of the De Subtilitate was another passage in which the tenets of Islam and the circumstances of the birth of Christ were handled in a way which caused grave scandal and offence.[227] This passage indeed was expunged in the edition of 1560. The Paralipomena were not in print and available, but what can be read in them to-day doubtless reflects with accuracy the attitude of Cardan's mind towards religious matters in 1570. Though the Paralipomena were locked in his desk, it is almost certain that the spirit with which they were inspired would have infected Cardan's brain, and prompted him to repeat in words the views on religion and a future state which he had already put on paper, for he rarely let discretion interfere with the enunciation of any opinion he favoured. In the Paralipomena are many passages written in the spirit of universalism, and treating of the divine principle as something which animates wise men alone, wise men and philosophers of every age and every clime, Aristotle being the head and chief. Plato and Socrates and the Seven Sages adorn this illustrious circle, which includes likewise the philosophers of Chaldea and Egypt. Opinions like these were no longer the passport to Papal favour or even toleration. The age of the humanist Popes was past, and the Puritan movement, stimulated into life by the active competition of the Reformers, was beginning to show its strength, so that a man who spoke in terms of respect or reverence concerning Averroes or Plato would put himself in no light peril. Thus for those of Cardan's enemies who were minded to search and listen it must have been an easy task to formulate against him a charge of heresy, specious enough to carry conviction to such a burning zealot as Pius V. This Pope, in his new regulations for the maintenance of Church discipline, requisitioned the services of physicians in the detection of laxity of religious practices, or of unsoundness. "We forbid," he says in one of his bulls, "every physician, who may be called to the bedside of a patient, to visit for more than three 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 Roman 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 one night with a lamp burning, when suddenly he heard a loud noise to the right of the chamber, as if a cart laden with planks was being unloaded. He looked up, and, the door being open at the time, he perceived a peasant entering the room. Just as he was on the threshold the intruder uttered the words, "Te sin casa," and straightway vanished. This apparition puzzled him greatly, and he alludes to it again in chapter xlvii. of the De Vita Propria. Ultimately he dismisses it with the remark that the explanation of such phenomena is rather the duty of theologians than of philosophers.

With regard to matters of religious belief he seems to have taken as a rule of conduct the remark above written, and left them to the care of professional experts, for very few of his recorded opinions throw any light upon his views of the dogmas and doctrines of the Church. Whatever the tenor of these opinions may have been, he never proclaimed them definitely. Probably they interested him little, for he was not the man to keep silent over a subject which he had greatly at heart. He gave a general assent to the teaching of the Church, taking up the mental attitude of the vast majority of the learned men of his time, and expected that the Church would do all that was necessary for him in its own particular province. If he regarded Erasmus and Luther as disturbers of the faith and heretics, he did not say so, nor did he censure their activity. (Erasmus he praises highly in the opening words of the horoscope which he drew for him.—Gen. Ex., p. 496.) But he had certainly no desire to emulate them or give them his support. The world of letters and science was wide enough even for his active spirit; the world lying behind the veil he left to the exploration of those inquirers who might have a taste for such a venture. Still every page of his life's record shows how strong was his bent towards the supernatural; but the phase of the supernatural which he chose for study was one which Churchmen, as a rule, had let alone. Spirits wandering about this world were of greater moment to him than spirits fixed in beatitude or bane in the next; and accordingly, whenever he finds an opportunity, he discourses of apparitions, lamiÆ, incubi, succubi, malignant and beneficent genii, and the methods of invoking them. Now that old age was pressing heavily upon him and he began to yearn for support, he sought consolation not in the ecstatic vision of the fervent Catholic, but in fostering the belief that he was in sooth under the protection of some guardian spirit like that which had attended his father and divers of the sages of old. Although he had in his earlier days treated his father's belief with a certain degree of respect and credence,[231] there is no evidence that he was possessed with the notion that any such supernatural guardian attended his own footsteps at the time when he put together the De Varietate; indeed it would seem that his belief was exactly the opposite. He writes as follows: "It is first of all necessary to know that there is one God, the Author of all good, by whose power all things were made, and in whose name all good things are brought to pass; also, that if a man shall err he need not be guilty of sin. That there is no other to whom we owe anything or whom we are bound to worship or serve. If we keep these sayings with a pure mind we shall be kept pure ourselves and free from sin. What a demon may be I know not, these beings I neither recognize nor love. I worship one God, and Him alone I serve. And in truth these things ought not to be published in the hearing of unlearned folk; for, if once this belief in spirits be taken up, it may easily come to pass that they who apply themselves to such arts will attribute God's work to the devil."[232] And in another place: "I of a truth know of no spirit or genius which attends me; but should one come to me, after being warned of the same in dreams, if it should be given to me by God, I will still reverence God alone; to Him alone will I give thanks, for any benefit which may befall me, as the bountiful source and principle of all good. And, in sooth, the spirit may rest untroubled if I repay my debt to our common Master. I know full well that He has given to me, for my good genius, reason, patience in trouble, a good disposition, a disregard of money and dignities, which gifts I use to the full, and deem them better and greater possessions than the Demon of Socrates."[233]

About the Demon of Socrates Cardan has much to say in the De Varietate. He never even hints a doubt as to the veracity and sincerity of Socrates. He is quite sure that Socrates was fully persuaded of the reality of his attendant genius, and favours the view that this belief may have been well founded. He takes an agnostic position,[234] confining his positive statement to an assertion of his own inability to realize the presence of any ghostly minister attendant upon himself. In the De Subtilitate he tells an experience of his own by way of suggesting that some of the demons spoken of by the retailers of marvels might be figments of the brain. In 1550 Cardan was called in to see a certain woman who had long been troubled with an obscure disease of the bladder. Every known remedy was tried in vain, when one day a certain Josephus Niger,[235] a distinguished Greek scholar, went to see the patient. Niger, according to Cardan's account, was quite ignorant of medicine, but he was reputed to be a skilled master of magic arts. The woman had a son, a boy about ten years old, and Josephus having handed him a three-cornered crystal, which he had with him, bade the youth secretly to look into it, and then declare, in his mother's hearing, that he could see in the crystal three very terrible demons going on foot. Then, after Josephus had whispered certain other words in the boy's ear, the boy went on to say that he beheld another demon, vastly bigger than the first, riding on horseback and bearing in his hand a three-tined fork. This monster overthrew the other demons, and led them away captive, bound with chains to his saddlebow. After listening to these words the woman rapidly got well, and Cardan, in commenting on the event, declares that she must have been cured either by the agency of the demons or by the force of the imagination, inasmuch as it would be difficult, if not impossible, to invent any other reason of her recovery.[236] In another passage of the De Subtilitate he displays judicious reserve in writing of Demons in general.[237]

During those terrible days, when his son had just died a felon's death, and when he himself was haunted by the real dangers which beset him, and almost maddened by the signs and tokens which seemed to tell of others to come, the belief which Fazio his father had nourished easily found a lodgment in his shaken and bewildered brain. In the Dialogus de Humanis Consiliis, one of the speakers tells of a certain man who is clearly meant to be Cardan himself. The speaker goes on to say that he is sure this man is attended by a genius, which manifested itself to him somewhat late in his life. "Aforetime, indeed, it had been wont to convey to him warnings in dreams and by certain noises. What greater proof of his power could there be than the cure of this man, without the use of drugs, of an intestinal rupture on the right side? If indeed it had not fared with him thus, after his son's death, he would at once have passed out of this life, whereby many and great evils might have come to pass. He was freed also from another troublesome ailment. In sooth, so many and so mighty are the wonderful things which had befallen him, that I, who am very intimate with him (and he himself thinks the same), am constrained to believe that he is attended by a genius, great and powerful and rare, and that he is not the master of his own actions. What he would have, he has not; and what he has, he would not have chosen, or even wished for. This thing causes him much trouble, but he submits when he reflects that all things are God's handiwork." The speaker ends by saying that he never heard of any others thus attended, save this man, and his father before him, and Socrates.[238]

But it is in chapter xlvii. of the De Vita Propria, which must have been written shortly before his death, that he lets the reader see most plainly how strong was the hold which this belief in a guardian spirit of his own had taken upon him. "It is an admitted truth," he writes, "that attendant spirits have protected certain men, to wit, Socrates, Plotinus, Synesius, Dion, Flavius Josephus, and myself. All of these have enjoyed prosperous lives except Socrates and me, and I, as I have said before, was at one time offered many and favourable opportunities for the achievement of happiness. But C. CÆsar the dictator, Cicero, Antony, Brutus, and Cassius were also attended by mighty spirits, albeit malignant. For a long time I have been persuaded that I too had one, but by what method it gave me intelligence as to events about to happen, I could not exactly ascertain until I reached the seventy-fourth year of my age, the season when I began to write this record of my life. I now perceive that when I was in Milan in 1557, when my genius perceived what was hanging over me—how that my son on that same evening had promised to marry Brandonia Seroni, and that he would complete the nuptials the following day—it produced in me that palpitation of the heart of which I have already made mention, a weakness known to my genius alone, a manifestation which served to simulate a trembling of the bed."

Cardan writes at length to show that the mysterious knocking which he and Rodolfo Sylvestro had heard during his imprisonment at Bologna, the peasant who entered his bed-chamber saying "Te sin casa," and divers other manifestations, going back as far as 1531—croaking of ravens, barking of dogs, and the ignition of fire-wood—must all have been brought about by the working of this powerful spirit. In 1570 there happened to him one of his everyday experiences of the presence of supernatural powers. In the middle of the night he was conscious of some presence walking about the room. It sat down beside him, and at the same time a loud noise arose from a chest which stood near. This phenomenon, he admits, might well have been the figment of a brain overburdened with thought; but suddenly his memory flies back to an experience of his twentieth year, upon which he proceeds to build a story, wild and fanciful even for his powers of imagination. "What man was it," he asks, "who sold me that copy of Apuleius when I was in my twentieth year, and forthwith went away? I indeed, at that time, had made only one essay in the literary arena, and had no knowledge of the Latin tongue; but in spite of this, and because the book had a gilded cover, I was imprudent enough to buy it. The very next day I found myself just as well versed in Latin as I am now. Moreover, almost at the same time I acquired knowledge of Greek and Spanish and French, sufficient for reading books written in these languages."

Cardan was by this time completely possessed by the belief in his attendant genius, and the flash of memory which recalled the purchase of some book or other in his youth, suggested likewise the attribution of certain mystic powers to this guardian genius, and conjured up some fanciful explanation as to the way these powers had been exercised upon himself; he, the person most closely concerned, being entirely unconscious of their operation at the time when they first affected him. This recorded belief in a gift of tongues is one of the most convincing bits of evidence to be gleaned from Cardan's writings of the insanity which undoubtedly afflicted him, at least periodically, at this crisis of his life.