 God was construed as the absolute maximum and divine infinite Oneness, while Nicholas viewed the natural universe as a contracted maximum whose unity-in-multiplicity and lack of physical limits “reflected” God’s positively unlimited oneness. Nicholas now entertains a third possibility, an anomalous joining of absolute and contracted in the God-man. He reviews, borrowing from Aristotle, the ordered universe of things belonging to natural types (genera and species), then modifies it by extending to individuals his idea of contraction or limitation. Individual specimens are all that exist, but not only are they contracted images of God’s oneness, but also contracted images of their types insofar as each more or less fulfills the possibilities of its nature.