  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.