nging the vault of heaven near to the moon, and the soul of his father
was there likewise. But he could not see this spirit, which spake to him
saying, "Behold, I am given to you as a comrade." The spirit of the father
then went on to tell the son how, after various stages of probation, he
would attain the highest heaven, and in the terms of this discourse Cardan
professed to discern the scheme of his more important works.

The _De Subtilitate_ represents Cardan's original conception of a
treatise dealing with the Cosmos, but during the course of its preparation
a vast mass of subsidiary and contingent knowledge accumulated in his
note-books, and rendered necessary the publication of a supplementary
work, the _De Varietate_,[118] which, by the time it was finished, had
grown to a bulk exceeding that of the original treatise. The seminal ideas
which germinated and produced such a vast harvest of printed words, were
substantially the same which had possessed the brains of Paracelsus and
Agrippa. Cardan postulates in the beginning a certain sympathy between the
celestial bodies and our own, not merely general, but distributive, the
sun being in harmony with the heart, and the moon with the animal humours.
He considers that all organized bodies are animated, so that what we call
the Spirit of Nature is present everywhere. Beyond this everything is
ruled by the properties of numbers.[119] Heat and moisture are the only
real qualities in Nature, the first being the formal, and the second the
material, cause of all things; these conceptions he gleaned probably from
some criticisms of Aristotle on the archaic doctrines of Heraclitus and
Thales as to the origin of the universe.

It is no marvel that a writer, gifted with so bizarre and imaginative a
temper, so restless and greedy of knowledge, sitting down to work with
such a projection before him, should have produced the richest, and at
the same time the most chaotic, collection of the facts of Natural
Philosophy that had yet issued from the press. The erudition and the
industry displayed in the gathering together of these vast masses of
information, and in their verification by experiment, are indeed amazing;
and, in turning over his pages, it is impossible to stifle regret that
Cardan's confused method and incoherent system should have rendered his
work comparatively useless for the spread of true knowledge, and qualified
it only for a place among the _labores ineptiarum_.