  It is while examining the essence of humane misfortune that Cardano reaches the important conclusion that loss and want are the ultimate causes of one’s hardships. The ability to anticipate and feel in advance the effect of losing something or someone (sensus amissionis) can therefore prepare us to face calamities in our life (De utilitate, OO, II, 7). While Cardano insists that experience of adversities in life (sensus calamitatum) provides people with a richer sense of their happiness, however, he is also well aware that there are limits in the human ability to process misfortunes into material for inner transformation (De utilitate, OO, II, 38b). Material destitution is certainly one of these limits. Among the circumstances that affect our perception of want, penury prevents us from focusing on the improvement of our knowledge and level of awareness. When in his division of the goods (of the mind, of the body and of fortune) Cardano describes material means as a pre-condition for the exercise of virtue and happiness, he takes special care in specifying that the ethical inconvenience in being poor does not lie in not having access to the advantages of material prosperity, but in the inability to work towards one’s own happiness: “if someone does not have the means to raise his children, to look for wisdom or to practice justice, he will certainly be unhappy, not because he is poor, but because he cannot practice the works of happiness” (De utilitate, OO, II, 26a). Mental pain is another situation in which human ability to turn misfortunes into positive experiences is tested to the limit. The way Cardano insists on the severe reality of mental pain (molestia animi, dolor animi) is one of the most characteristic aspects of his moral philosophy: “No disease, if there is not fear of death, can equal mental pain (dolor animi)” (De utilitate, OO, II, 18a).