Jerome Cardan Author:Henry Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MIND AND MATTER. 33 CHAPTER IV. ILLS OF THE FLESH—THE STIPEND OF THE HUNDRED SCUDI. The spirit of the young Cardan, housed within its temple of the fles... more »h, suffered, in contact with the world about it, such discouragements. The story of his outer life up to his nineteenth year is told in the preceding chapters. We must now put a ringer on his pulse. The day may come when somebody shall teach us how to estimate the sum of human kindness that proceeds from good digestion and a pure state of the blood—the disputes and jealousies that owe their rise entirely to the livers of a number of the disputants—or how much fret- fulness, how many outbursts of impatience, how much quick restlessness of action, is produced by the condition of the nervous matter. Such calculations, though we cannot make them in the gross, we make, or ought to make, instinctively when we become intimate with individuals. The physical life of a man cannot be dissociated fairly from his intellectual and moral life, when we attempt to judge him by the story of his actions. In the VOL. I. D case of Jerome Cardan, it is more than commonly essential that we know a little of the body that he carried to his work, for its unsoundness influenced his conduct and caused many a wise man to shrug his shoulders, both among contemporaries and long afterwards, and even to this day, over the question, " Had he not madness in his composition1 ?" As there are few, even of the rosiest among us, who have bodies absolutely free from all trace of disease or malformation, perfect health of body being a most rare condition, so it is with perfect health of mind. Every excess of one class of ideas over the just proportion involves loss of balance. Before reasoning can master the 1 " Verum extremes amentia fuit, imo impise aud...« less