 Focusing on the last case, which is in any case the most colorful and captivating, Suárez argues that it falls to the metaphysician to come to terms with such true sentences such as “The gryphon is fierce”, “Gryphons do not exist”, and even “The gryphon frightened the children to the point where some of them began to cry uncontrollably”. How can these sentences be true, when there is nothing here about which one may talk or think? What must be the case, if these sentences are to be accepted as true? Perhaps, one may think, the gryphon must exist in some way, if it is to be fierce; that if it can be said not to exist, then it—the thing about which the speaker is speaking—must exist in some one way but not in some other; and, most of all, that if it is to be implicated in the causal network, it certainly must exist—or else it could not stand in a causal relation to anything at all. Indeed, Suárez himself gives voice to just these sorts of contention in other contexts. For example, this last observation is perfectly reflected in a claim he makes about the necessary conditions of formal causation: “The first requisite [for formal causation] is the actual existence of a form itself” (prima est actualis existentia ipsius formae: DM XV 6.3). The question, then, is how beings of reason can enter the causal network if they fail this first requirement of any cause: that it exist.