Those critics who pass judgment on Cardan, taken solely as a Physician or as a Mathematician, will give a presentment more fallacious than imperfect generalizations usually furnish, for in Cardan's case the man, taken as a whole, was incomparably greater than the sum of his parts. Naude remarks that a man who knows a little of everything, and that little imperfectly, deserves small respect as a citizen of the republic of letters, but Cardan did not belong to this category, as Julius Caesar Scaliger found to his cost. He was not like the bookmen of the revival of learning--Poliziano, Valla, or Alberti may stand as examples--who after putting on the armour of the learned language and saturating themselves with the _literae humaniores_, made excursions into some domain of science for the sake of recreation. Cardan might rather be compared with Varro or Theophrastus in classic, and with Erasmus, Pico, Grotius, or Casaubon in modern times. On this point Naude indulges in something approaching panegyric. He writes--"Investigation will show us that many excelled him in the humanities or in Theology, some even in Mathematics, some in Medicine and in the knowledge of Philosophy, some in Oriental tongues and in either side of Jurisprudence, but where shall we find any one who had mastered so many sciences by himself, who had plumbed so deeply the abysses of learning and had written such ample commentaries on the subjects he studied? Assuredly in Philosophy, in Metaphysics, in History, in Politics, in Morals, as well as in the more abstruse fields of learning, nothing that was worth consideration escaped his notice."