  Above nonhuman and human animals, Cardano posits a universe teeming with the most diverse kinds of incorporeal minds. He acknowledges that to count the number of celestial substances populating the supralunary world would go way beyond the power of reason; and yet Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite, “relying on Platonic arguments and the visions of St Paul” divided them into nine orders. Within these orders Cardano identifies “seven natures.” The first nature is the “the infinite, or God,” eternal in itself. The second nature is “the soul of all things or lives,” which represents the first breaking up of the original unity; then comes the already mentioned soul of the world, whose loss of ontological unity and independence begins to manifest itself, being “one principle resulting out of many and eternal ones because of something else’s intervention.” The fourth nature is the soul which moves the universe, the primum movens, not eternal in itself, but through eternal temporal succession. The fifth nature, the souls of the various planets, derives from the combined action of this primary mover and the soul of the world. Various orders of souls emanates from the fifth nature: “heroic” souls, minds that are capable of having sense perceptions (mentes sensiles) and the soul that presides over all sentient lives (communis sensilis). This last type of soul divides itself not only into individual beings, but also into parts, “for everything is alive.” The next nature, therefore, the sixth one – the “common and vital soul” (anima communis atque vitalis) – belongs to plants, lower animals and the elements. The last order is “the soul conceived in matter,” which “Plato called idea,” and Cardano simply characterizes as “life.” Relying on later Platonic authors, from Iamblichus to Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite, Cardano describes the universe as one single entity, seamlessly interrelated throughout its vital expanse, placed between the two extremes of God, absolute eternity and unity, and matter, the domain of absolute transience and multiplicity (De arcanis aeternitatis, OO, X, 6ab).