Contrary to what is usually argued in the secondary literature, Husserl always considered as the ultimate ambition of his philosophizing the foundation of a scientific metaphysics. The purpose of this essay is to clarify his conception of metaphysics from his earliest writings through the late 1920s and beyond. I would like to propose a unitary interpretation of the development of Husserl’s conception – a unitary interpretation which, however, will also have to account for the internal transformations of the concept of metaphysics. If at the beginning of his career, Husserl identifies metaphysics with first philosophy, he later calls it last philosophy. Finally, a third phase can be identified in which metaphysics coincides with the realization of the system of philosophy.