  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).