Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) is one of the great anomalies in the history of thought: one thinker functioning in two contrary roles, each reversing the other. The role of being, on the one hand, the consummator of one phase of philosophical speculation, the realist and Scholastic; and, on the other, the initiator (though an unwitting one) of another phase, the idealist, modern, and nihilist. This shift from realism to idealism was crucial in Western philosophy; it inaugurated an era of irrepressible, if chaotic, creativity.