The importance of Suarez, both with respect to his historical influence and with respect to the intrinsic merit of his philosophical work, is becoming increasingly recognized.' Suarez was one of the first scholastic philosophers to write a systematic presentation of metaphysics that was not a commentary on Aristotle.' He was so successful in this undertaking that his work was used as a university textbook and as a model for aspiring metaphysicians for over a hundred years, not only by his fellow Jesuits but, perhaps to an even greater extent, by Protestant philosophers and theologians. Nor was Suarez's influence restricted to the scholastic tradition which we are now coming to see was far from dead in the 17th century, but it extended, both through that tradition and independently of it, into the main currents of modern thought. It can be detected in Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff and, ultimately, even in Kant. So pervasive was Suarez's influence on modern thought that Alasdair Maclntyre has been bold enough to assert that Suarez, not Descartes, was the first truly modern philosopher.'