  The principal resources through which human beings may learn to draw advantages from adversities are fortitude, prudence, worldly knowledge (rerum experientia), and all sorts of helps (auxilia), such as material means, friends, authority, bodily strength and practical experience (exercitatio) (De utilitate, OO, II, 12a). Among the resources provided by reason, Cardano shares with Seneca the belief that meditating about one’s death (meditatio mortis) can trigger active and pointed responses to everyday problems: “although death is a necessary event, nevertheless, it contains in an eminent way, so to say, all the reasons that sadden our life.” Thinking about death, regardless of whether people may be sure that they are going to survive after death, “can dissolve almost any form of sorrow” (De utilitate, OO, II, 17b). When methodically structured, far from producing anxiety, the thought of death and of the transient nature of all human affairs injects a sense of purpose and order into our existence, making us gradually adjusted to a universe in a constant flux. Cardano’s method of drawing profit from adversities is based on the general principle that everything in nature is subject to incessant change: “I usually compare human affairs, this whole sublunary frame (machina sublunaris) and all that happens in it to a mass of wax in which, while it is compressed, protrusions become cavities and cavities protrude, all forms change, and now they change into similar ones, now into dissimilar ones, into charming or foul, horrible and pleasant ones.” The principle of the unremitting transformation of reality (vicissitudo rerum) is therefore the ontological rationale behind our belief that ills can be turned into goods (De utilitate, OO, II, 14b). Closely related to this principle is Cardano’s striking assumption that, when considered from the point of view of happiness, all things are on a par (omnia aequalia sunt): “God levelled the conditions not only for all human beings, but also for all things which are under the sky” (De utilitate, OO, II, 18a, 24b).