James Ward (1843–1925)

With the exception of John Ellis McTaggart, all the best-known representatives of British idealism, philosophers such as Thomas Hill Green, Francis Herbert Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, held a version of absolute idealism, the theory according to which reality as a whole is a single unified consciousness or cosmic experience. Starting with Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison’s Hegelianism and Personality (1887), however, a reaction began in Britain against what was perceived to be an illegitimate reduction of the individual personality to an adjectival mode of the one Reality. The philosophy of the Cambridge Professor James Ward, now a largely forgotten figure but once a very respected thinker, is one of the most significant attempts made in that period to combine the idealistic standpoint with a pluralistic metaphysics.

1. Brief Vita

James Ward was born in Hull, Yorkshire, on 27th January 1843, as a son of an unlucky merchant. In addition to the family’s economic difficulties, Ward’s early life was shaped by the strict Calvinistic faith in which he was brought up. In 1863 he entered Spring Hill College (later incorporated in Mansfield College, Oxford) with the aim of becoming a minister, but grew increasingly sceptical of the content of his faith. In the middle of his religious crisis he moved to Germany for a temporary period of study, attending lectures by Dorner and Trendelenburg in Berlin and by one of the most important philosophers of the time, Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), in Göttingen. Lotze exerted a tremendous influence on Ward and it was probably the German philosopher who directed his attention towards the study of Leibniz, whose theory of monads was to constitute the basis of Ward’s own metaphysical system.

Upon returning to England, Ward made a sincere yet vain attempt to retain his faith, accepting a Pastorate in Cambridge; his spiritual crisis came finally to an end in 1872, when he abandoned his life-long project of becoming a minister. Ward decided to apply as a non-collegiate student at Cambridge, and one year later he won a scholarship in Moral Science at Trinity College. Important lessons were learned during these difficult years, and in a letter to a friend Ward explains his attitude towards life with words that should sound familiar to any reader of Whitehead: “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 at will” (Ward 1927, 59).

Clearly, such an insight owes more to the struggle of existence than to abstract speculation and there is no denying that 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, and 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 very distinguished career. Ward became well-known for his epoch-making article on “Psychology” (1886) in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which he criticized the associationism of Mill and Bain, and in the years 1896-1898 he delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures, later published with the title Naturalism and Agnosticism (1896-1898). 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 of materialism. 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).

Moore and Russell were among Ward’s students at Cambridge and have left sympathetic and affectionate testimonies of his personality and teaching style (Moore 1942, Russell 1944). 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 1907-1910 and published in 1911 with the title The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism: it is here that Ward provides the most complete exposition of his idealistic metaphysics.

2. Ward’s Pluralistic Theism

Before entering into a discussion of Ward’s idealistic view of reality, it may be helpful to dispel an ambiguity concerning the meaning of the term “idealism.” A distinction needs to be drawn between the meaning which the term acquires when it is used in epistemology, where it refers to the thesis that the object of perception is dependent for its existence upon the perceiving subject, and its meaning in metaphysics, where it stands for the belief that reality is “spiritual” in nature. Since Ward advocates a form of metaphysical idealism, the main philosophical positions opposed to it are Cartesian dualism, which posits the reality of insentient matter as well as of minds, and materialism. Ward engages in a detailed critique of both these theories before advancing his own version of idealism.

The critique of materialism is developed at considerable length in the first series of Gifford Lectures, Naturalism and Agnosticism. Ward observes 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 accounted for. Moreover, materialism fails to provide an adequate ontology for biology, for it cannot explain the emergence of life from lifeless matter, and is inconsistent with the latest development of physics, which is moving away from the traditional conception of the atom as an inert particle and is reaching a more dynamic understanding of the ultimate constituents of the physical in terms of force and energy.

On closer consideration, Ward concludes, the metaphysics of materialism is so beset with difficulties that the real question is not whether it is true, but why it has been held in the first place. Ward traces the origin of belief in materialism to a tendency to mistake abstract conceptions for concrete realities. At the beginning of scientific investigation, when we are faced with the concrete whole of our experiences, we focus our attention upon certain selected aspects of that whole and proceed to construct abstract mathematical models in order to explain them. There is nothing wrong with this procedure. Nevertheless, mistakes are likely to be committed when the scientist forgets the empirical origin of his abstract concepts and regards his constructed notions as the sole real things. In this case, the scientist “confound[s] his descriptive apparatus with the actual phenomena it is devised to describe” (1899, 81). As Ward also writes in a significant passage, the scientist “is not entitled to let his abstract simplification harden into concrete fact […] [I]f such unwarrantable concreting of abstracts is to lead logically to a mechanical theory of the universe, we do well to take note of it” (1899, 110).

As against Cartesian dualism, Ward contends that it is grounded upon an illegitimate reification of two aspects that characterize all human experience. There is no doubt that experienced reality possesses both objective and subjective features (for example, we experience inert objects such as tables and rocks as well as our own mentality), yet as soon as two different kinds of substances are made to correspond to them, we become incapable of accounting for their unity: a striking illustration of the failure of Cartesian dualism is its incapacity to account for psycho-physical interaction. Subsequent attempts to overcome the shortcomings of Cartesian dualism, such as Malebranche’s occasionalism, are for Ward inherently implausible positions, which nobody would have dreamt of entertaining if a spurious ontological distinction between mind and body had not been illegitimately drawn in the first place. Nor does epiphenomenalism, which involves the causal inefficacy of mental events, provide a better solution to the mind-body problem: if mental events have no causal role to play, why should they exist at all?

These reflections led Ward to the idealistic conclusion that reality must be interpreted “in terms of Mind.” Absolute idealism will not do, for Ward regards it as explanatorily vacuous; the theory that experienced reality is the appearance of the One does nothing to make the nature of that experience 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 the great monistic thinkers Spinoza and Hegel, nor do their British followers do any better in this regard. Ward substantiates the latter 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.

In the formulation of his idealism, Ward takes his inspiration from Leibniz. The following passage deserves to be quoted in full:

[T]he 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. The positions retained are first, that every monad ‘perceives’ every other, secondly, that every monad is appetitive, seeking pleasurable situations, or at least shunning painful ones […]. Finally, every system of thoroughgoing pluralism accepts the Leibnizian principle of continuity, at least to the extent of maintaining that there is no infinite gap, no complete diversity between, one monad and another, a principle against which the Leibnizian theology itself offends (1911, 53-54).

This passage contains all the basic elements of Ward’s idealism. In the first place, Ward accepts the fundamental idea that the ultimate constituents of reality must be mind-like substances, endowed with a capacity for perception while also embodying a principle of activity. Specifically, in saying that “every monad is appetitive,” Ward ascribes to his monads a desire for self-preservation as well as for self-realization: both features are required, for if the monads were solely animated by a desire for self-preservation, they would give rise to a static universe and not to the world of becoming which we experience. Secondly, Ward admits that all differences between the monads are to be considered as differences in degree. Nevertheless, he rejects what he takes to be Leibniz’s conception of God as the supreme monad. In conceiving God as the creator of the world, Leibniz introduced a qualitative gap with the other monads, so that God cannot be viewed as a primus inter pares. As a consequence, Leibniz’s theology contrasts with a radical application of the principle of ontological continuity. Thirdly, Ward rejects Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony. The appearance of interaction is not illusory, a mere pre-programmed synchronism. Ward’s monads are not shut out from each other: in terms of Leibniz’s famous image, they have “windows,” a capacity for direct mutual interaction.

Ward supports his monadism with reflections of different kinds. One main argument appeals to the principle of evolutionary continuity, according to which higher forms of existence are evolved out of lower ones. The principle is supposed to prove that experience of some sort must be a feature of the ultimate constituents of reality, for human experience could not have evolved out of insentient bits of matter. On the other hand, if some primordial form of experience is present at the basic level of reality, a transition must have occurred from lower to higher forms of experience. According to Ward, this transition can be explained in terms of the monad’s interactions: in the process of dealing with the other monads constituting the surrounding environment, each monad is forced to refine its perceptions and its general awareness of the external world.

Ward also puts much weight upon the consideration that monadism is the only theory capable of explaining necessity (order) as well as contingency (freedom), both of which are irreducible aspects of experienced reality. In striving to achieve self-conservation, the monads do not remain isolated from each other, but enter into relations that are felt as pleasurable or painful. In this way, groupings of various sorts are formed. In those aggregates where the modus vivendi turns out to be particularly convenient and the monads possess a rather feeble desire for self-realization, a certain fixity and regularity of behavior is achieved. Such aggregates constitute the noumenal counterpart of what, on the phenomenal level, appear as inorganic objects. In other cases, wholes are formed in which lower monads perform a subservient role with respect to higher ones: a dominant monad is here present, which controls the behavior of the whole and confers upon it a capacity for free, unpredictable action.

The theory of the dominant monad and the accompanying distinction between two basic kinds of wholes enables Ward to take an original position with regard to other philosophical questions, such as the status of natural laws and the mind-body problem. Whereas on a materialistic conception natural laws are to be viewed as being in force from the start—a “brute fact” of which no further explanation can be given—a theory of aggregating monads makes it possible to view them as statistical generalizations, which record how particular aggregates of monads tend to behave. On this view, natural laws are not deterministic and are themselves the product of evolution. With regard to the mind-body problem, once the idea of the “windowless” monad has been rejected, the dominant monad that constitutes the mind of a human being can be conceived as interacting directly with the monads constituting the neurons, which in turn can be conceived as interacting with the monads constituting the body. According to Ward, the precise nature of this interaction cannot be specified, yet it can be grasped on the model of social intercourse and must be viewed as a form of “sympathetic rapport”: “the relation here is not that of subject to object, but rather of subject to subject” (1911, 463).

Having argued that a pluralistic idealism of interacting monads is sufficient to explain the nature of the experienced world, Ward raises the further question whether his idealistic pluralism can serve as a basis for asserting the reality of God. Ward clearly acknowledges the speculative nature of his reflections on theism and recognizes that they fall short of constituting a proof of God’s existence. Nevertheless, Ward contends that the task of the philosopher is not solely to account for experienced reality (to this end, a system of monads without God would suffice) but also to provide a view of the universe as unified as possible and, most importantly, which endows reality with meaning.

God’s existence must therefore be postulated on theoretical as well as on practical grounds. From a theoretical point of view, the idea of God as the ontological ground of the monads would enhance the degree of unity which can be ascribed to the world: Ward distinguishes between the cosmological unity which the monads possess in virtue of their constituting the same ordered system, and the ontological unity which they would acquire in virtue of a common reference to God as the foundation of their existence. From a practical point of view, the idea of God serves the purpose of satisfying our need of believing that evolution will continue its course from lower to higher and better forms of existence: “what ground have we to expect progress on the whole? In a word, without such spiritual continuity as theism alone seems able to ensure, it looks as if a pluralistic world were condemned to a Sisyphean task” (1911, 215). The idea of God thus grounds what, according to Ward, is our need to believe that a condition of universal harmony will be achieved.

If these are the reasons for postulating God’s existence, more must be said concerning the relation between God and the world. What is meant, for example, by calling God the “creator” of the world? What sort of relation is here involved?

Ward emphasizes that the term “creation” can be interpreted in a literal sense only at the cost of facing insurmountable difficulties, such as that of explaining God’s motivations for creating the world or for chosing to create it at a certain particular moment. This and other traditional theological puzzles concerning God’s creative act are spurious intellectual difficulties, generated by the fact that all our conceptions are derived from experience. Ward’s empiricist position with regard to our ideas inevitably leads to the skeptical conclusion that the relation between God and the world is one that cannot be defined, and indeed Ward holds that its nature can be described only by means of analogies. Ward appeals to the image of the artist and his work of art (1911, 239), with the aim of emphasizing that this relation involves transcendence (the work of art is, as a product, distinct from the artist who produced it) as well as immanence (the work of art is a manifestation of the artist’s nature, the artist recognizes himself in his work). Clearly, such an explanation is unsatisfactory. Having criticized the absolute idealists for not clarifying the nature of the relation between the Absolute and its appearances, Ward ends up facing the same difficulty with regard to God and the world: in both cases, the problem of explaining how the One stands to the Many remains unsolved.

An account of Ward’s metaphysics would not be complete without a mention of his defense of free will. Traditionally, the problem of the freedom of the will can arise as a consequence of the espousal either of determinism, or of an omniscient God’s foreknowledge of all future events. With regard to the former, Ward’s solution consists in denying strict determinism and in holding that laws of nature are statistical generalizations that hold for larger groups of monads rather than for each particular monad. In the latter case, Ward denies that God has any knowledge of the future. Each monad is free to take the course of action that seems best, while God is aware of all possible ways of conduct open to each monad at any given moment. Although God does not know what will actually happen, the course taken by events in the world will not be entirely unexpected.

No further analysis of the nature of free will is provided by Ward, however, and it remains an open question how God’s role in assuring that evolution will not degenerate into regress can be made consistent with the ascription of genuine freedom to each monad.

3. Ward’s Influence on Whitehead

According to Whitehead’s biographer Victor Lowe, in Cambridge Whitehead “saw a good deal” of Ward (Lowe 1985, 118). This could easily explain some very striking similarities between their philosophies.

To begin with, the mistake of “hardening” abstractions into concrete facts, denounced by Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism, is a clear antecedent of what Whitehead calls the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” that is, “the expression of more concrete facts under the guise of abstract logical construction,” or the “error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete” (SMW 50-51). As explained above, Ward held that the “hardening” of abstractions was the cause of belief in materialism. Another effect of this mistake is that it leads to a spatialized conception of time “as comparable to a line, save that its points or parts are not simultaneous but successive” (1911, 305). It is because they focus on this abstract conception of time that philosophers condemn it as unreal and reach a view of reality as eternal and changeless. This criticism of philosophers’ treatment of time is identical with the one advanced by Whitehead. In Symbolism, for example, Whitehead writes that “the fallacy of ‘misplaced concreteness’ abstracts time [from the concrete flux of our experiences] and leaves time with the more generic character of pure succession” (S 39). Interestingly enough, the idea of a contrast between an abstract time and our concrete subjective experience is commonly associated with the philosophy of Bergson: Ward argues that he had anticipated Bergson in his article on “Psychology” (1911, 307).

Another similarity between Ward and Whitehead is that the critique of Cartesian dualism and other traditional solutions of the mind-body problem (occasionalism, parallelism, and epiphenomenalism) led them to adopt a version of panpsychism, the doctrine that experience is a basic feature of all constituents of reality. They articulated this doctrine in a similar way too, for both conceived of natural laws as statistical generalizations and of inorganic bodies as aggregates of monads. According to Ward, the apparent existence of inert bodies is grounded upon the particular structure in which the monads are embedded, as well as upon the particular nature of such monads, which possess only a very weak desire for betterment and self-realization and which therefore tend to remain satisfied with the given arrangement. Adapted to the new ontological framework provided by the ontology of process, the theory reappears in Whitehead’s Process and Reality, where the idea that there are monads with a feeble desire for self-realization is replaced by the idea that some occasions have a less developed mental pole. Such occasions inherit the received contents without transforming them in any significant way, thus contributing to the conservation of existing structures. Whitehead’s dipolar conception of an actual occasion thus runs parallel to Ward’s conception of the monad, with the mental pole being the locus of novelty and creative advance, the physical pole the locus of repetition and self-preservation (PR 32).

Whitehead also adopts Ward’s solution of the mind-body problem in terms of the doctrine of the dominant monad and, most interestingly, views its interaction with the subservient monads as a form of sympathy. Whitehead goes far beyond Ward, for he tries to provide a detailed specification of the nature of this interaction, yet his account is still based upon the idea of a sympathetic rapport. The first stage of an occasion’s life is indeed characterized by Whitehead as a conformal phase in which the novel occasion reiterates the feelings of the occasion felt. As Whitehead puts is: “The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion.” And even more explicitly, he writes: “In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another” (PR 162).

Finally, Ward’s theism may also have been an important source of stimulation for Whitehead’s reflections on the nature of God and God’s relation to the world. As argued in Section 2 above, Ward was unable to specify the nature of the relation between the One and the Many, but believed that relation to involve both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence. Whitehead addresses this problem directly. God’s transcendence is manifest in the primordial nature, a realm of possibilities in itself wholly indifferent to the world’s actual development. At the same time, God can be regarded as immanent, since God provides each occasion with an initial aim, an ideal towards which to tend. Divine causation and creaturely freedom are also reconciled, for each occasion is free to modify the ideal proposed by God. Viewed in this way, Whitehead’s reflections on natural theology can be interpreted as an attempt to bring to completion Ward’s own theistic argument, by recasting it in terms of the new categoreal scheme developed in Process and Reality, and especially of the dipolar conception of God, which he is now in a position to articulate.

Surprisingly enough, Whitehead does not seem to acknowledge any debt to Ward in his writings. Brief as they are, however, the above remarks suggest, first of all, that Ward must have exerted a tremendous influence on him, most likely through conversation, in the period they both lived at Cambridge. Second, they provide strong prima facie evidence in support of an interpretation of Whitehead’s metaphysics as a version of British personal idealism; at least, the continuity between process philosophy and Ward’s idealism should not be in doubt. Lastly, and in view of the similarities between the philosophy of Whitehead and that of Leibniz, they point to Ward as a crucial figure to focus upon if one is interested in exploring this historical connection. One will then have to go back to Ward’s German teacher, Hermann Lotze, whose metaphysical synthesis became known to many philosophers through his widely studied Microcosmus and Metaphysics, and from whom many of Ward’s ideas concerning the nature of the mind and of the physical world actually derive. Although Lotze ultimately adopted a monistic position, he revitalized the German monadological tradition, showing how a modified version of Leibniz’s theory of monads could provide an alternative to mechanistic materialism that was consistent with the results of the natural sciences (an introduction to Lotze’s philosophy and intellectual development is provided by Pester 1997).

Works Cited and Further Readings

Books by James Ward

1899. Naturalism and Agnosticism. The Gifford Lectures Delivered Before the University of Aberdeen in the Years 1896–1898, 2 Vols. (London, Adam and Charles Black).

1904. Philosophical Orientation and Scientific Standpoints (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1904).

1911. The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism. The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the Years 1907–10 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

1913. Heredity and Memory: Being the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, Delivered at Newham College, 9 November 1912 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

1918. Psychological Principles (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

1922. A Study of Kant (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

1926. Psychology Applied to Education, edited by G. Dawes Hicks (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

1927. Essays in Philosophy: with a Memoir by Olwen Ward Campbell, edited by W. R. Sorley and G. F. Stout (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Selected Articles and Chapters by James Ward

1876.”An Attempt to Interpret Fechner’s Law,” Mind, 1, 1, 1876, 452-66.

1880. “Herbart,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, Volume 11 (Edinburgh, Black), 718-20.

1882.”A General Analysis of Mind,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 16, 366-85.

1883. “Psychological Principles I: The Standpoint of Psychology,” Mind, 8, 153-69.

1883. “Psychological Principles II: Fundamental Facts and Conceptions,” Mind, 8, 465-86.

1883. “Objects and Their Interaction,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 17, 169-79.

1886. “Psychology,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth edition, Volume 20 (Edinburgh, Black), 37-85.

1887. “Psychological Principles III: Attention and the Field of Consciousness,” Mind, 12, 45-67.

1887. “Mr. F. H. Bradley’s Analysis of Mind,” Mind, 12, 564-75.

1890. “The Progress of Philosophy,” Mind, 15, 213-33.

1894. “Review of F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality,” Mind, New Series, 3, 378-82.

1902. “Naturalism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Tenth Edition, Volume 31 (Edinburgh, Black), 87-89.

1902. “Psychology,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Tenth edition, Volume 32 (Edinburgh, Black), 54-70.

1925. “Bradley’s Doctrine of Experience,” Mind, New Series 34, 13-38.

1925. “A Theistic Monadism,” Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements, edited by J.H. Muirhead (London, George Allen and Unwin; New York, MacMillan).

1926. “An Introduction to Philosophy,” Monist, 36, 1-19.

Other Authors

Aliotta, A. 1914. The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (London, MacMillan), 265-68.

Bartlett, F. C. 1925. “James Ward, 1843-1925,” American Journal of Psychology, 36, 449-53.

Basile, Pierfrancesco. 2006a. ‘All Monads have windows: James Ward and the Reception of Leibniz’s Theory of Monads in British Idealism’, Einheit in der Vielheit. VIII Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress, edited by Herbert Breger, Jürgen Herbst und Sven Erdner (Hannover: G. W. Leibniz Gesellschaft) 29-36.

Basile, Pierfrancesco. 2006b. ‘Rethinking Leibniz: Whitehead, Ward and the Idealistic Legacy’, Process Studies, 35.2, 207-229.

Broad, C. D. 1912. “Review of The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism”, International Journal of Ethics, 23, 1, 77-84.

Coates, Adrian. 1929. A Sceptical Examination of Contemporary British Philosophy (London, Brentano).

Cunningham, G. W. 1933. The Idealistic Argument in Recent British and American Philosophy (New York and London, Century).

Dowdall, H. C. 1926. “The Application of Ward’s Psychology to the Legal Problem of Corporate Entity,” The Monist, 36, 1, 111-35.

Hamlyn, D. W. 1968. “Bradley, Ward and Stout,” Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology, edited by Benjamin B. Wolman (New York, Harper and Row), 298-320.

Hicks, G. Dawes. 1925. “The Philosophy of James Ward,” Mind, 34, 280-99.

Hoernlé, Alfred R.F. 1930. Idealism as a Philosophy (New York, Richard R. Smith), 128-48.

Johnson, W. E. “Professor James Ward, 1843-1925,” British Journal of Psychology, 16, 1925-26, 1-4.

Kuntz, Paul Grimley. 1971. “Rudolf Hermann Lotze: Philosopher and Critic,” introduction to George Santayana’s Lotze’s System of Philosophy, edited by Kuntz, P. G. (Bloomington and London, Indiana University Press).

Laird, J. 1926. “James Ward’s Account of the Ego,” The Monist, 36, 1, 90-110.

Lamprecht, Sterling P. 1926. “James Ward’s Critique of Naturalism,” The Monist, 36, 1, 136-52.

Leroux, Emmanuel. 1926. “James Ward’s Doctrine of Experience,” The Monist, 36, 1, 70-89.

Lowe, Victor. 1985. Alfred North Whitehead. The Man and His Work. Vol. I: 1861–1910 (Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press).

Lotze, Rudolph Hermann. 1884. Metaphysics, in three Books, Ontology, Cosmology and Psychology, translated by Bernard Bosanquet et al. (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

Lotze, Rudolph Hermann. 1885. Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and His Relation to the World, translated by E. Hamilton and E. C. Jones (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark).

Macquarrie, John. 1963. Twentieth Century Religious Thought. The Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology, 1900-1960 (New York and Evanston, Harper and Row).

Moore, G. E. 1942. “An Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston and Chicago, Northwestern University Press).

Muirhead, John H. 1913. “The Last Phase of Professor Ward’s Philosophy,” Mind, 22, 321-330.

Murray, Andrew Howson. 1937. The Philosophy of James Ward (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Passmore, John. 1957. “Personality and the Absolute,” A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, Duckworth), 81-85.

Pester, Reinhardt. 1997. Hermann Lotze. Wege seines Denkens und Forschens. Ein Kapitel deutscher Philosophie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, (Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann).

Rylance, Rick. 2000. Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Russell, Bertrand. 1944. “My Mental Development,” The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston and Chicago, Northwestern University Press).

Sorley, William R. 1925. “James Ward,” Mind, 34, 273-79.

Sorley, William R. 1926. “Ward’s Philosophy of Religion,” The Monist, 36, 1, 56-69.

Stout, G. F. 1926. “Ward as a Psychologist,” The Monist, 36, 1, 20-55.

Taylor, Alfred Edward. 1900. Critical Notice of “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” Mind, New Series, 9, 34, 245-58.

Turner, J. E. 1926. “The Ethical Implications of Ward’s Philosophy,” The Monist, 36, 1, 153-69.

Turner, F. H. 1974. Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, Yale University Press).

Wolman, B. B. 1968. Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology (New York, Harper and Row).


Author Information

Pierfrancesco Basile
Institut für Philosophie
Universität Bern
Länggassstrasse, 3000 Bern 9
p.basile@bluewin.ch

How to Cite this Article

Basile, Pierfrancesco, “James Ward (1843–1925)”, last modified 2008, The Whitehead Encyclopedia, Brian G. Henning and Joseph Petek (eds.), originally edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond, URL = <http://encyclopedia.whiteheadresearch.org/entries/bios/contemporaries/james-ward/>.