## 1. Life




James Ward was born in Hull, Yorkshire, on 27th January 1843, as a
son of James Ward, senior, a merchant with some scientific and
philosophical ambition (in a book entitled *God, Man and the
Bible*, he tried to give a scientific explanation of the Flood).
His father's enterprises were disastrous, however, so that lack
of resources was to be a constant source of anxiety for the family,
which included an uneducated, hard-working, deeply religious mother,
six sisters and a brother (another son died).




After one of his father's bankruptcies, Ward remained for two
years without schooling and occupation. At the age of thirteen and a
half, the boy was let free to occupy his time as he wished. In the
small country town where his family had moved, Waterloo near Liverpool,
he developed a spirit of solitude and a love of nature. A
'Memoir' written by the philosopher's daughter, Olwen
Ward Campbell, enables us to get a glimpse of his life in these early
years: "Waterloo was only a village in those days, and wild
stretches of sandhills lay beyond it for many miles. Here he used to
wander for hours on end, alone with his thoughts and the sea
birds" (1927: 7).




In addition to the family's economic difficulties,
Ward's youth was shaped by the narrow Calvinistic faith in which
he was raised. In 1863 he entered Spring Hill College (later
incorporated in Mansfield College, Oxford) with the aim of becoming a
minister, but became increasingly skeptical of the doctrines he was
expected to preach. In the middle of his religious crisis, Ward moved
to Germany for a temporary period of study. In Gottingen, he
attended lectures by one of the most influential philosophers of the
time, Rudolf Hermann Lotze. It is probably from Lotze that Ward gained
a first substantial appreciation of the philosophy of Leibniz, whose
theory of monads was later to provide the basis of his own
metaphysics.




Upon returning to England, Ward made a sincere yet vain attempt to
retain his faith and accepted a pastorate in Cambridge. His spiritual
crisis reached its climax and the point of no return in 1872, when he
definitively abandoned the project of becoming a minister and applied
as a non-collegiate student at Cambridge. One year later, he won a
scholarship in Moral Science at Trinity College.




Important lessons were learned in the anguish of these vicissitudes
and deliberations. In a letter to a friend, Ward writes: "I am
coming to see more clearly every day that man is only half free, or
rather that his freedom is not what I once thought it. It is not the
power to choose anything, but only the power to choose between
alternatives offered, and what these shall be circumstances determine
quite as will" (59). Surely, this insight owes more to the
struggle of existence than to abstract speculation. Interestingly,
Ward's mature philosophy comprises a defense of human freedom and
sustains the idea that--independently of circumstances outside of
our control--we always retain a capacity for responsible
action.




Ward made the best out of the difficult challenge of beginning a new
life at the age of thirty. In 1874 he obtained a first in his Tripos;
one year later, he won a fellowship with a dissertation entitled
'The Relation of Physiology to Psychology,' part of which
was published in the first issue of *Mind* in 1876. These
successes marked the beginning of a distinguished career. He first
became known for his article on 'Psychology' (1886) in the
*Encyclopaedia Britannica*, in which he criticised Mill and
Bain's associationism, and in the years 1896-98 he delivered the
prestigious Gifford Lectures, later published under the title
*Naturalism and Agnosticism* (1899). In this book, Ward attacked
the various forms of scientific materialism that were current in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The lectures were well received
by his contemporaries and there was a widespread agreement that Ward
had been effective in his refutation. According to Alfred Edward
Taylor, who reviewed the book in *Mind* in 1900, "one may
assert without much fear of contradiction that Prof. Ward's
Gifford Lectures are the philosophical book of the last year"
(Taylor 1900: 244).




G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell were among Ward's students at
Cambridge, where he had been elected to the new Chair of Mental
Philosophy and Logic in 1897. Moore has left a vivid testimony of his
personality and teaching style; as he recalls,



> 
> 
> We sat around a table in his rooms at Trinity, and Ward had a large
> notebook open on the table before him. But he did not read his
> lectures; he talked; and, while he talked, he was obviously thinking
> hard about the subject he was talking of and searching for the best way
> of putting what he wanted to convey. (Moore 1942: 17)




Moore describes Ward as a melancholy personality, overwhelmed by the
difficulties of philosophical thinking--'*Das Denken ist
schwer*' was one of his favorite sayings. (16) And while
Moore was also impressed by Ward's 'extreme sincerity and
conscientiousness' (18), Russell singles him out as one for whom
he had a 'great personal affection' (Russell 1946: 10).




Ward's reputation as a philosopher must have been very high, for he
was invited to deliver a second series of Gifford Lectures. These
were held in the years 1907-1910 and published in 1911
as *The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism*; it is in this
book that he provides the most complete exposition of his idealistic
metaphysics.


## 2. Metaphysics




Ward reached his metaphysics--a theory of interacting
monads--by way of criticism of the two main philosophical
tendencies of his day, scientific materialism and
'absolute' (or 'monistic') idealism. The
critique of materialism is developed at considerable length in the
first series of Gifford Lectures, *Naturalism and Agnosticism*.
Ward observes here that the view of reality as a system of inert
material particles subject to strict deterministic laws cannot explain
the world's contingency, a fundamental aspect of experienced
reality that needs to be taken at face value. Moreover, materialism
fails to provide an adequate ontology for biology, for it cannot
explain the emergence of life from lifeless matter. The doctrine is
also inconsistent with the latest development of physics, which is
moving away from the seventeenth-century, Democritean conception of the
atom as an inert particle--a microscopic, indivisible
'thing.'




Ward's overall conclusion is that materialism is so beset with
difficulties that the real question is not whether it is true, but why
it has come to be believed in the first place. Ward traces the origin
of this doctrine in a tendency to confound abstractions with concrete
realities. At the beginning of inquiry, the scientist is faced with a
concrete whole of experience, but takes notice only of some aspects of
it. This is wholly justified, but errors are likely to be committed if
he overlooks the richness of the empirical basis from which his notions
are derived. He is then apt to "confound his descriptive
apparatus with the actual phenomena it is devised to describe"
(1899: Vol. 1, 81). Materialism is the metaphysics of the scientist
lacking understanding of his own procedure.




These reflections led Ward to the idealistic conclusion that reality
must be interpreted 'in terms of Mind.' Absolute
idealism--the then widespread view that reality is a cosmic
consciousness or single 'Experience'--will not do, for
Ward regards it as explanatorily vacuous. The theory that the world of
finite things is but the 'appearance' of the One does
nothing to make the nature of the world more intelligible. Why does the
One appear in the way it does? And why does it have to appear at all?
These questions find no answer in the works of great monistic thinkers
such as Spinoza and Hegel, nor do their British followers do any better
in this respect. Ward substantiates this claim with a quotation from
Bradley's *Appearance and Reality* (1893), where he admits
that the 'fact of fragmentariness,' that is, why the One
appears in the form of a multiplicity, cannot be explained.




The upshot of these two parallel lines of arguments--the
critique of materialism and Absolute idealism--is that some form
of pluralistic idealism must be true. And it is only natural at this
point to turn to Leibniz, and especially so for a thinker so well
acquainted with German philosophy. According to Ward, however,
Leibniz's metaphysics needs to be amended in one fundamental
respect:



> 
> 
> ...the well-known *Monadology* of Leibniz may be taken
> as the type, to which all modern attempts to construct a pluralistic
> philosophy more or less conform. But the theology on which Leibniz from
> the outset strove to found his *Monadology*, is, in the first
> instance at all events, set aside; and in particular his famous
> doctrine of pre-established harmony is rejected altogether. (1911:
> 53-54)




Ward's main crux is that pre-established harmony fails to
leave any room open for contingency and genuine novelties. In
Leibniz's system, evolution can only be interpreted as
'preformation,' the gradual unfolding of what in a
compressed form is already present at the beginning. This is
inconsistent with a correct understanding of evolution, which involves
'epigenesis'--the coming into being of unexpected
facts.




Interestingly, the same criticism is advanced against philosophies
such as Hegel's that conceives of natural history as the
'externalization' of a primordial 'Idea.' Ward
notices, however, that Hegel's description of nature--as
'a bacchantic God' (148), and as providing 'the
spectacle of a contingency that runs out into endless detail'
(139)--is insightful and wholly in line with his own; indeed, he
goes so far as to say that 'there is a strong undercurrent of
[Leibnizian] pluralism running through the whole of Hegel's
philosophy.' (159)




Part of Leibniz's motivation for holding to pre-established
harmony was the alleged impossibility of making sense of
*transeunt* causation--that is, causation understood as a
direct relation between distinct monads (as opposed to
*immanent* causation, which holds between successive stages of a
monad's life). If direct interaction is impossible, how to
account for the correlations between things except by assuming that it
had been established by a supreme Architect? In the hands of Leibniz,
this surprising view as to the nature of causation becomes the
foundation of an original proof of God's existence.




Ward attacks Leibniz's reasoning at its very basis. Causal
interaction was understood by Leibniz in terms of the doctrine of
*physical influx*. On that model, direct causal interaction is
rejected because properties cannot exist unless as inhering in
substances; in passing from one substance to another, however, the
communicated property would have to exist in a detached condition,
which seems absurd. Could this simple piece of reasoning suffice to
reject what we seem to experience all the time, namely our power to act
directly upon external realities and to be immediately affected by
them? In his answer to Leibniz, Ward remarks that the theory of
*physical influx* categorizes the terms of a causal relation as
substances to which qualities inhere; on this theory, even the monads
are therefore conceived as if they were things. This involves a special
sort of category-mistake: 'Monads'--Ward
says--"are conative, that is are feeling and striving
subjects or persons in the widest sense, not inert particles or
things" (260).




In other words, since monads are not 'things' but
'subjects,' the argument against direct monadic
interaction is blatantly invalid. As Ward puts it: "If the
Leibnizian assumption, that there are no beings devoid of perception
and spontaneity... is otherwise sound, then the objections to
transeunt action between things become irrelevant" (219). Hence,
in a polemical reversion of Leibniz's famous metaphor, he concludes
that 'all monads have windows' (260).


## 3. Natural Philosophy




If pre-established harmony fails to account for the world's
contingency, it must be asked whether Ward's theory of
interacting monads can explain nature's order and regularity. The
element of contingency that pervades the world is immediately accounted
for by the assumption that the ultimate constituents of reality are
'living' subjects, but how do orderly processes emerge?
Ward formulates this question as follows: "Can we conceive such
an interaction of spontaneous agents..., taking on the appearance
of mechanism?" (1927: 239).




The solution consists in interpreting nature after a social analogy.
The following thought-experiment illustrates the idea: "Let us
imagine a great multitude of human beings, varying in tastes and
endowments as widely as human beings are known to do, and let us
suppose this multitude suddenly to find themselves, as Adam and Eve
did, in an ample Paradise enriched sufficiently with diverse natural
resources to make the attainment of high civilization possible"
(1911: 54). It is obvious to Ward that such individuals would
gradually achieve a hierarchical, specialized form of social
organization. To a hypothetical external observer, the initial phases
of the new life of the selected individuals will appear utterly
chaotic, but in due course order and regularity would emerge:
"...in place of an incoherent multitude, all seemingly
acting at random, we should have a social and economic organization,
every member of which had his appropriate place and function"
(55-56).




It is after this fashion that nature should be understood. Consider
an apparently inert object such as a piece of rock. This is not an
aggregate of material atoms, but a society of active subjects. Starting
out from a state of mutual isolation, Ward speculates, a plurality of
monads might end up finding a satisfactory *modus vivendi*.
These monads might then continue to stick together--either because
they are unwilling to break out of the social structures in which they
are embedded, or because they have become unable to do so. To clarify
this concept, Ward appeals to an ingenious simile:



> 
> 
> ...as there are some individuals who are restless, enterprising
> and inventing to the end of their days, so there are others who early
> become supine and contented, the slaves of custom and let well alone.
> The simpler their standard of well-being and the less differentiated
> their environment the more monotonous their behavior will be and the
> more inert they will appear. (60)




Thus, monads might get imprisoned within a form of life in the same
way in which persons might get imprisoned in their habits. While the
more energetic monads will try to escape routine, other will acquiesce
in it. It is the passivity and repetitiveness of the monad's
behavior that generates 'the appearance of mechanism.'




In spite of the rejection of pre-established harmony, this
conception still owes much to Leibniz's teaching. On Ward's
view, the physical objects apprehended in ordinary experience are the
appearance to us of a structured conglomerate, or societal whole, of
living subjects (1927: 239). Such appearances are not illusions. Our
immediate sensations fail to reproduce the object's real internal
constitution, yet they do point toward realities actually existing
independently of the perceiving subject. Ward's metaphysical
idealism thus comes with a form of epistemological realism, while his
conception of every-day physical objects is virtually identical with
Leibniz's notion of *phenomena* *bene fundata*.
Stated in Kantian terminology, physical objects are the appearances to
us of things whose *noumenal* being or intrinsic nature is
mental or experiential. According to Ward (1911: 392), Kant too was
forcefully drawn to this position, even in his critical phase and in
spite of his notorious claim that *noumena* lie outside the
categories of the understanding and sensible intuition.




Ward's social account of the natural world provides the
foundation for an original account of natural laws that he conceived of
as *statistical*, *evolved* and *transient*. In
the first place, in a universe that is ultimately social, natural laws
must be of the like of economic or anthropological laws; as such, they
hold for groups of monads rather than for individual ones and are
statistical generalizations rather than eternally fixed decrees.
Secondly, natural laws are to be regarded as the products of evolution
because they record the habitual behavior of groups of socialized
monads, and habits have to be acquired or 'learned' over
time. Thirdly, it is a historical platitude that societies emerge and
decay. Since the natural laws dominating a given epoch depend upon that
epoch's social order, natural laws cannot be regarded as
immutable; like all finite realities, they too are likely to change in
the course of cosmic history.




Another notable Cambridge thinker and Leibnizian scholar, Charles
Dunbar Broad, nicely summarized Ward's conception with the
following words:



> 
> 
> ...it seems quite impossible to explain the higher types of
> mental fact materialistically, whilst it does not seem impossible to
> regard physical and chemical laws as statistical uniformities about
> very large collections of very stupid minds. (Broad 1975: 169)




Ward's account might be profitably compared with a similar one
provided by Charles Sanders Peirce in his important essay of 1891,
'The Architecture of Theories.' Here, Peirce advocates the
view that "the only intelligible theory of the universe is that
of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits
becoming physical laws" (153). Furthermore, he contends that
"the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and
for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This
supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes
an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in
nature" (148).




Despite the analogies, a major point of controversy is represented
by Peirce's *tychism*--the doctrine hinted at in the
just quoted passage that 'absolute chance' (*tyche*)
is of the essence of the universe. The disagreement is not as to
whether there is a level of reality that escapes external
determination--a striking anticipation of Heisenberg's
indeterminacy principle that both Peirce and Ward endorse. The question
is as to how that most fundamental level is to be understood. In a
passage that can only be interpreted as a reply to Peirce, Ward
writes:



> 
> 
> Some pluralists, very ill advisedly as I think, have identified this
> element [contingency, what is unpredictable in the world] with pure
> chance and even proposed to elevate it to the place of a guiding
> principle under the title of 'tychism' [...] But every
> act of a conative agent is determined by--what may, in a wide
> sense, be called--a motive, and motivation is incompatible with
> chance, though in the concrete it be not reducible to law. (1911:
> 76)




This critique rests upon the argument that--since monads are
'subjects' in the full sense of the term--they cannot
act at random; specifically, monads act either in order to secure
self-preservation or to achieve self-realization. This doctrine is
phenomenologically well-grounded. Our own psychic life provides us with
an immediate grasp of the inner life of a monadic creature, and it is
clear to Ward that we do experience ourselves as motivated in this
way.




In sum, for Ward it is the 'teleological' that grounds
the 'mechanical.' A monad always aims at self-preservation
and self-realization; this is the simplest way in which the
monad's *conatus*--or will to live--manifests
itself. At the same time, self-preservation and self-realization are
two fundamental metaphysical parameters, the defining features of each
monad's 'character.' If the need for
self-preservation predominates, the monad will acquiesce in its
acquired status. These are Broad's 'stupid minds' and
represents the conservative elements in nature. *Per contra*,
'intelligent' monads actively seek self-realization. Their
importance in the cosmic scheme cannot be underestimated; eventually,
it is their craving for novelties that powers evolution and prevents
history from coming to a halt.


## 4. Philosophy of Mind




Ward's theory of monads is a radical form of panpsychism; on
this view, experience is not solely ubiquitous--it is all there
truly his. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the debate on
panpsychism was launched by the publication in 1878 of William Kingdon
Clifford's 'On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves.'
This essay was perfectly attuned to the *Zeitgeist*, since it
linked panpsychism with evolutionary theory. Clifford appeals to the
non-emerge argument: the transition from inert matter to conscious
beings would be unintelligible, a kind of unfathomable *creatio ex
nihilo*; hence, we are forced to conclude that
'experience' is an intrinsic, aboriginal feature of
matter.




Ward apparently agrees with the general drift of this argument. In
an essay significantly entitled 'Mechanism and Morals,' he
explains that one need not fear the theory of evolution; this does not
degrade either consciousness or human life, but leads to a
spiritualized view of matter:



> 
> 
> It is interesting... to notice that in the support which it
> lends to pampsychist [*sic*] views the theory of evolution seems
> likely to have an effect on science the precise opposite of that which
> it exercised at first. That was a leveling down, this will be a
> leveling up. At first it appeared as if man were only to be linked with
> the ape, now it would seem that the atom, if reality at all, may be
> linked with man. (1927: 247)




Ward's endorsement of Clifford's evolutionary argument,
however, points towards a tension in his philosophy. If evolution means
'epigenesis'--the coming into being of what was not
potentially present at the beginning--it is not clear why Ward
should be worried by the generation of mind out of matter. Conscious
existence might well be one of the novelties evolution is capable of
producing.




Ward does, at any rate, vehemently reject Clifford's specific
version of panpsychism. Clifford speculated that each atom of matter
was associated with a quantum of experience, a small piece of
'mind-stuff.' This piece of 'mind-stuff' was
conceived as an atom of experience, amounting to something less than a
complete thought or feeling. Clifford also held that thoughts and
feelings could be constituted simply by way of combination. "When
molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous system of a
vertebrate," he wrote, "the corresponding
elements of mind-stuff are so combined as to form some kind of
consciousness." Analogously, "when matter takes the complex
form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the
form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition"
(65). In this way, Clifford believed, it would be possible to explain
why the genesis of complex material structures in the course of
evolution is accompanied by the parallel emergence of higher forms of
sentience and mental activity.




The theory is best regarded as a form of psycho-physical
parallelism; this is, at all events, how Ward interprets it in
*Naturalism and Agnosticism*, just before subjecting
'Clifford's wild speculations concerning mind-stuff'
(1899: Vol. 2, 12) to a devastating critique.




Ward's criticizes Clifford's theory on three main
accounts. (1) In the first place, the whole theory presupposes a
point-to-point correspondence between matter and mind. Clifford's
conception of an atom, however, is obsolete: 'if the speculations
of Lord Kelvin and others are to be accepted, and the prime atom itself
is a state of motion in a primitive homogeneous medium [the ether],
what is the mental equivalent of this primordial medium?' (114)
In other words, Clifford's theory couples material atoms with
simple ideas. But if the atom is not a simple particle but a state of
an underlying substance, it is not so easy to see what precisely in our
consciousness could correspond to it.




(2) Secondly, Clifford's views--'a maze of
psychological barbarism' (15)--totally misrepresent the
nature of human consciousness. It is inconceivable how there could be
experiences apart from subjects of experiences or larger wholes of
consciousness, such as the smallest pieces of mind-dust will have to
be: "Nobody bent on psychological precision would speak of ideas
as either conscious or intelligent, but still less would he speak of
ideas existing in isolation apart from, and prior to, a consciousness
and intelligence" (15-16). Clifford fails to recognize the
fundamental psychological fact of the unity of consciousness; the
psychical field is not made up of simple sensations in the way in which
a mosaic-picture is made up of little stones.




(3) Lastly, the mind-dust theory faces its own problem of emergence.
Why should the transition from inert matter to consciousness be
regarded as more mysterious than the transition from little pieces of
consciousness to the single, unified consciousness of a human being?
"Allowing that it [mind-dust] is not mind, he [Clifford] makes no
attempt to show how from such dust a living mind could ever
spring" (15). Thus, Clifford's theory has no explanatory
advantage over competitor accounts of the mind-body relation; there is
still a 'gap' that needs to be closed.




One easily sees that Ward's theory of monads does not face any
of these difficulties. (1) The correlation between the psychical and
the physical is not a one-to-one correspondence between discrete
physical atoms and discrete psychical atoms, but is explained in terms
of a Leibnizian theory of 'confused perception.' (2) There
are no 'subjectless' experiences, but all experienced
contents are 'owned' by the monads, each of which is a
genuine unity containing distinct perceptual
contents--Leibniz's '*petites
perceptions*' (1911: 256), but is not literally
'made up' by them. The relationship between the mind and
the monads in the body, Ward also remarks in this connection (196), is
not that of a whole to its parts but that of a dominant to its
subordinate monads. (3) And lastly, there are no mysterious transitions
in Ward's theory. The growth of the mind--from the inchoate
experiences of infants to the relatively sophisticated experiences of
adult human beings--shows that 'lower' states are
superseded by 'higher' ones thanks to intersubjective,
social intercourse.




Hence, Ward sums up his discussion by claiming the superiority of a
Leibnizian approach over Clifford's mind-stuff theory:



> 
> 
> Had he [Clifford] followed Leibniz instead, he could have speculated
> as to simple minds to his heart's content, but would never have
> imagined that absurdity, 'a piece of mind-stuff,' to which
> his fearless and logical interpretation of atomistic psychology had led
> him; he would never have imagined that ... mind ... could be
> described in terms that have a meaning only when applied to the
> complexity of material structure. (1899: Vol. 2, 16)




Nevertheless, Ward's theory does leave several questions open.
In the first place, if our conscious apprehension of the external world
is mediated by our direct apprehension of the monads constituting the
body and more specifically the brain--as Ward contends (1911:
257-258)--why are we not aware of our neurons? Secondly,
Ward's theory escapes the composition-problem, but this is now
replaced by the problem of monadic interaction. How does the dominant
monad influence the lower ones and rule over them? Thirdly, there is a
question as to the nature of space. Granted that direct monadic
interaction is real, where does it occur? Interaction would seem to
require a common dimension or medium in order to be possible at all;
what kind of dimension could host spiritual beings such as the monads
are supposed to be?




Disappointingly enough, on all these crucial issues Ward has nothing
to say. In the absence of a satisfactory treatment of these topics,
however, his theory becomes intrinsically unstable, as further
reflection might show that the positions just reached will have to be
abandoned.


## 5. Natural Theology




As in the rest of his philosophy, evolutionary theory also looms large
in Ward's natural theology. The existence of God, Ward frankly
recognizes, cannot be proved. However, a theory of interacting monads
cannot guarantee that the universe will keep moving towards a state of
increasing harmony and cohesion: "without such a spiritual
continuity as theism alone seems able to ensure," Ward remarks,
"it looks as if a pluralistic world were condemned to a
Sisyphean task" (215). At the same time, the worldly monads need
the leadership of a supreme agent if harmony has to be widespread
across the entire universe. Accordingly, Ward's main problem is to
understand how God can be related to the world of monads and guide
them towards the realization of societies of ever increasing
perfections.




It is clear to Ward that there must be an ontological gap between
God and the monads. God cannot be a *primus inter
pares*--only a monad among other monads (as Leibniz's
language sometimes suggests). Since God is the world's *ratio
essendi*--its ontological foundation, rather than its creator
in time--He must be regarded as altogether transcendent. At the
same time, since God has to lure the evolutionary process, He cannot
merely maintain the world in existence, but must somehow actively enter
into it; His relation to the world must therefore involve an aspect of
immanence. This gives rise to a dilemma: how could God be both immanent
and transcendent? Ward can do no better than to provide an analogy in
which God is compared with a Cosmic Artist:



> 
> 
> We may discern perhaps a faint and distant analogy... in what
> we are wont to style the creations of genius... the immortal works
> of art, the things of beauty that are a joy forever, we regard
> as... the spontaneous output of productive imagination, of a free
> spirit that embodies itself in its work, lives in it and loves it.
> (238-239)




Needless to say, this analogy is too 'faint and distant'
to be of any real help.




Ward strikes an original note in his attempt to accommodate the
reality of God with epigenesis. Since he believes that novelties could
only be generated by the interplay of genuinely free agents, he
conceives of God as limiting himself in the exercise of his power, so
as to let the monads free: "Unless creators are created,"
he says, "nothing is really created" (437). Having
renounced omnipotence, God cannot have knowledge of a future he does
not control anymore. This means that the notion of divine
omniscience--which in the case of Leibniz takes the form of the
doctrine of complete concepts--must be abandoned. God lacks
knowledge of future contingents; nevertheless, he is aware of all the
possibilities open to a monad at any moment, so that the future will
never come to him as unexpected: "God, who knows both tendencies
and possibilities completely, is beyond surprise and his purpose
beyond frustration" (479). Clearly, such a God cannot be the
perfect, immutable God of Leibniz and of classical theism, but is a
developing God whose knowledge of the world increases with the
unfolding of cosmic history. How does such a God lure the world
towards greater perfection? This question too is left unanswered;
always candid, Ward acknowledges that God's "*modus
operandi*...is to us inscrutable" (479).


## 6. Legacy




Ward's metaphysics has had very little impact upon later
Anglo-American philosophy, but it was not without influence in the
Cambridge philosophical world in the first two or three decades of the
twentieth century. Bertrand Russell explicitly recognizes his
indebtedness to his teacher in his scholarly study of 1900, *A
Critical Examination of the Philosophy of Leibniz*. Although he
complained that Ward's philosophy was 'dull and
antiquate' in a letter to Ottoline Morrell (Griffin 1991: 39), it
is arguable that the influence run deeper, as Russell cultivated an
interest in those questions at the verge between natural philosophy,
philosophy of mind and metaphysics that so much mattered to Ward. This
becomes clear as soon as one considers that he is not solely the
celebrated author of 'On Denoting' (1905) and *The
Principles of Mathematics* (1903), but also of *The Analysis of
Mind* (1921) and *The Analysis of Matter* (1927).




Other Cambridge thinkers that might have been influenced by Ward are
John Ellis McTaggart, C. D. Broad, and Alfred North Whitehead. In
*The Nature of Existence* (1921/1927) McTaggart developed a
system of idealistic metaphysics that bears some resemblance with
Leibniz's theory of monads. Broad says in his
'Autobiography' (1959) that his idealist professor had
'little influence' on his thought (50), yet he favorably
(and acutely) reviewed Ward's *The Realm of Ends* and
devoted an important study to Leibniz's philosophy. Arguably,
the greatest ascertained influence was exerted on Alfred North
Whitehead; the system of metaphysics that he exposed in *Process
and Reality* (1929) incorporates all the crucial ideas of
Ward's philosophy of nature, while his conception of the
God-World relationship is a way of bringing to completion Ward's
fragmentary account. (Basile 2009: 61-62, 142-43) One
might reasonably expect that, outside of Cambridge, his philosophy
should have been taken into serious consideration by thinkers with an
interest in *Naturphilosophie*, and especially so by a
philosopher usually referred to as an 'idealist' such as
Robin G. Collingwood, but there seems to be no documentary evidence of
this. American process philosopher and theologian Charles Hartshorne,
whose speculative system approximates to Whitehead's, displays
in print knowledge of Ward's works. (1963: 19)




Ward's philosophy is little known today and scholarly
discussions of his thought are scanty. In the widely read *A
Hundred Years of Philosophy*, John Passmore compares it
unfavourably with McTaggart's: "In McTaggart's case,
the difficulty is to give a summary account of a highly intricate
pattern of argument; in Ward's case, to decide what he really
meant to say on the issues of central philosophical importance"
(82). In an age in love with logical technicalities, this is like
putting a heavy stone on the philosopher's grave.




Passmore's judgment is not entirely justified; the essentials
of Ward's philosophical *credo* are clear enough. The
reasons for the oblivion in which his thought has fallen are historical
and have much to do with a general shift of philosophical concerns, as
he belonged to a philosophical world that was swept away *as a
whole* by the mounting tide of linguistic philosophy--a world
in which other towering figures were, just to mention a few names,
forgotten but truly exceptional personalities like Francis Herbert
Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Samuel Alexander, and George Santayana. It
is not a sheer accident that Ward's chair was inherited by Moore, and
then by Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to regard his
philosophy as little more than a relic from the past. The question
concerning the mind's place in nature is still at very centre of
philosophical debate; panpsychism has been recently recognized as a
hypothesis worth contemplating by acclaimed philosophers such as Nagel
(1979) and Chalmers (1996); more surprisingly perhaps, the idea that
the riddle of the universe might be solved by a theory of interacting
monads has resurfaced in recent 'revisionary' work by Galen
Strawson (2006: 274).




At a deeper level, Ward's thought is admirable for his sincere
attachment to the ideal of philosophical speculation as a non-dogmatic
source of orientation. His belief in the creative powers and
'freedom' of the monad--which he defended from
Peircian tychism, scientistic determinism and traditional
theism--implicitly grounds an ethics of responsibility, while his
evolutionary theism (a form of *meliorism*, rather than of
*optimism*) inspires a confident yet not naive attitude towards
life and its challenges. Surely, Ward's own
vicissitudes--from debilitating poverty to public recognition as
Cambridge Professor of Mental Philosophy--are reflected in his
grand vision of reality as comprising an indefinite number of conative
subjects obstinately striving to achieve self-realization and social
harmonization; in this only sustained, as he was wont to say, by
'faith in light to come' (1927: 66).