and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the _coincidentia
oppositorum_, the absolute _maximum_ and the absolute _minimum_ coincide.
That which in the world exists as concretely determinate and particular,
is in God in a simple and universal way; and that which here is present
as incompleted striving, and as possibility realizing itself by gradual
development, is in God completed activity. He is the realization of all
possibility, the Can-be or Can-is (_possest_); and since this absolute
actuality is the presupposition and cause of all finite ability and action,
it may be unconditionally designated ability (_posse ipsum_), in antithesis
to all determinate manifestations of force; namely, to all ability to be,
live, feel, think, and will.

However much these definitions, conceived in harmony with the dualistic
view of Christianity, accentuate the antithesis between God and the world,
this is elsewhere much softened, nay directly denied, in favor of a
pantheistic view which points forward to the modern period. Side by side
with the assertion that there is no proportion whatever between the
infinite and the finite, the following naïvely presents itself, in open
contradiction to the former: God excels the reason just as much as
the latter is superior to the understanding, and the understanding to
sensibility, or he is related to thought as thought to life, and life to
being. Nay, Nicolas makes even bolder statements than these, when he calls
the universe a sensuous and mutable God, man a human God or a humanly
contracted infinity, the creation a created God or a limited infinity; thus
hinting that God and the world are at bottom essentially alike, differing
only in the form of their existence, that it is one and the same being
and action which manifests itself absolutely in God, relatively and in a
limited way in the system of creation. It was chiefly three modern ideas
which led the Cusan on from dualism to pantheism--the boundlessness of the
universe, the connection of all being, and the all-comprehensive richness