  If pre-established harmony fails to account for the world’s contingency, it must be asked whether Ward’s theory of interacting monads can explain nature’s order and regularity. The element of contingency that pervades the world is immediately accounted for by the assumption that the ultimate constituents of reality are ‘living’ subjects, but how do orderly processes emerge? Ward formulates this question as follows: “Can we conceive such an interaction of spontaneous agents…, taking on the appearance of mechanism?” (1927: 239).