  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.