  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).