  It is easy to see, however, how Absolute idealism threatens those very ideals it is supposed to defend, since it denies that finite existence is truly real and downgrades it to ‘a show of some fuller splendor.’ If reality is a single unified totality, what is the individual self? If the past, the present and the future are not real for the Absolute, wherein lays our freedom? If reality is eternally perfect, what is the point of our moral struggles? The philosophy of the Cambridge Professor James Ward (1843–1925)—now a largely forgotten figure but once a very respected thinker—is an attempt at overcoming these difficulties by combining the idealistic standpoint with a pluralistic metaphysics.