 Suárez devotes a great deal of energy to an investigation of topics pertaining to causation, broadly construed. This is because he is interested in the first instance, as a metaphysician, in an investigation into the causes of being (DM XII–XXVII), an approach to metaphysics colored by the writings of Aristotle, the broad idiom of which Suárez, in common with other scholastics, embraces. More specifically, first, in keeping with the Aristotelian conception of science (scientia), Suárez supposes that to understand anything we must grasp and understand the causes of that thing; so, as a special case, to understand being (ens) we must investigate and understand the causes of being, taken in its most general and abstract aspect. Second, as he conceives it, causal inquiry proceeds within the context of an Aristotelian four-causal framework of explanatory adequacy: material, formal, efficient, and final. Suárez supposes, however, that to execute his study of the causes of being, it is first of all incumbent on him to understand precisely what it is for something to be a cause, but then also further, as a distinct matter, what it is for a cause to exercise its causality.