  Ward’s metaphysics has had very little impact upon later Anglo-American philosophy, but it was not without influence in the Cambridge philosophical world in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell explicitly recognizes his indebtedness to his teacher in his scholarly study of 1900, A Critical Examination of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Although he complained that Ward’s philosophy was ‘dull and antiquate’ in a letter to Ottoline Morrell (Griffin 1991: 39), it is arguable that the influence run deeper, as Russell cultivated an interest in those questions at the verge between natural philosophy, philosophy of mind and metaphysics that so much mattered to Ward. This becomes clear as soon as one considers that he is not solely the celebrated author of ‘On Denoting’ (1905) and The Principles of Mathematics (1903), but also of The Analysis of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927).