 Within this overarching framework, Suárez proceeds to investigate each of the four causes minutely. One immediately appreciates when studying his treatment of these issues a level of detail and sophistication plainly lacking in many of the accounts of causation written in the several centuries after his death. It is difficult to believe, for example, that Hume's modest and cursory suggestion, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that a cause is “an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second” (Hume 1993 [1748], II.7) is an advance in nuance or sophistication over Suárez's the protracted discussions of the Metaphysical Disputations.