 Suárez conducts his metaphysical inquiries against the backdrop of a pervasive commitment to nominalism, according to which only individuals exist: all extra-mental entities are singular and individual (DM VI 1.2; cf. DM V passim). Since whatever is singular and individual is not common, it follows, in Suárez’s preferred idiom, that ‘formal unity, as it exists in a thing, is incommunicable’ (DM VI 1.11). This is to say, then, that nothing extra-mental is fully shared by more than one being; hence, there are no universals, where these are conceived as mind- and language-independent entities capable of being wholly present in more than one place at one time.