  In spite of the rejection of pre-established harmony, this conception still owes much to Leibniz’s teaching. On Ward’s view, the physical objects apprehended in ordinary experience are the appearance to us of a structured conglomerate, or societal whole, of living subjects (1927: 239). Such appearances are not illusions. Our immediate sensations fail to reproduce the object’s real internal constitution, yet they do point toward realities actually existing independently of the perceiving subject. Ward’s metaphysical idealism thus comes with a form of epistemological realism, while his conception of every-day physical objects is virtually identical with Leibniz’s notion of phenomena bene fundata. Stated in Kantian terminology, physical objects are the appearances to us of things whose noumenal being or intrinsic nature is mental or experiential. According to Ward (1911: 392), Kant too was forcefully drawn to this position, even in his critical phase and in spite of his notorious claim that noumena lie outside the categories of the understanding and sensible intuition.