 This may help us understand why Nicholas’ sketch of mens involves both the mind-independent things and the mind itself as normative measures of the assimilation that is human cognition. We become like the knowable features of the things we know and we fashion the conceptual and judgmental measures whereby we take them into ourselves as known. The full determinate intelligibility of mind-independent things and states of affairs provides a kind of ideal limit that we acknowledge in recognizing the inadequacy and shortcomings of what we do know about them. That is why Nicholas deems our knowledge “conjectural.”