"Among the first of those who bade adieu to the Scholastic creed was the Cardinal Nicolas Cusanus, a man of rare sagacity and an able mathematician; who arranged and republished the Pythagorean Ideas, to which he was much inclined, in a very original manner, by the aid of his Mathematical knowledge. He considered God as the unconditional Maximum, which at the same time, as Absolute Unity, is also the unconditional Minimum, and begets of Himself and out of Himself, Equality and the combination of Equality with Unity (Son and Holy Ghost). According to him, it is impossible to know directly and immediately this Absolute Unity (the Divinity); because we can make approaches to the knowledge of Him only by the means of Number or Plurality. Consequently he allows us only the possession of very imperfect notions of God, and those by mathematical symbols. It must be admitted that the Cardinal did not pursue this thought very consequently, and that his view of the universe which he connected with it, and which represented it as the Maximum condensed, and thus become finite, was very obscure. Nor was he more successful in his view of the one-ness of the Creator and of Creation, or in his attempt to explain the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, by means of this Pantheistic Theism. Nevertheless, numerous profound though undeveloped observations on the faculty of cognition, are found in his writings, interspersed with his prevailing Mysticism. For instance, he observes, that the principles of knowledge possible to us are contained in our ideas of Number (ratio explicata) and their several relations; that absolute knowledge is unattainable to us (precisio veritatis inattingibilis, which he styled docta ignorantia), and that all which is attainable to us is a probable knowledge (conjectura). With such opinions he expressed a sovereign contempt for the Dogmatism of the Schools."