The Second Letter to Bernard is a more elaborate treatise on “evident certainty.” Nicholas argues that every certitude is reducible to the “first principle” that contradictories cannot be simultaneously true. It follows that “the certitude of evidence has no degrees” and that “in every consequence reducible to the first principle by as many intermediates as you please, the consequent is really identical with the antecedent or with part of what is signified by the antecedent.” The domain of what can really be demonstrated is thus very narrow: From
