 Both of these strands can seen to be operative in chapter 7 of The Layman: About Mind. There Cusanus gives a somewhat more detailed account of how he sees the mind’s cognitive functions operating at the levels of sensation, imagination, reasoning and intellectual vision or intuition. Here, as in his later work entitled Compendium, we find that Nicholas inherited a technical vocabulary and conceptual framework for human knowing that embodies the medieval Aristotelian view that natural things are the causes and measures of perceptual and conceptual human knowledge. On that view, what we understand is to correspond to the intelligible aspects of things that are mind-independent so that an identity in intelligibility between mind and thing results—the mind is measured by things. While Nicholas insists that the active, self-moving mind directs and integrates the joint operation of our knowing capacities, he also agrees that the mind has no innate ideas and that mental life has to be awakened or stimulated by direct contact with the perceptible world. He never questions that the perceptible world (“the plurality of things”) exists and is independent of our minds and our knowledge.