  Ward reached his metaphysics—a theory of interacting monads—by way of criticism of the two main philosophical tendencies of his day, scientific materialism and ‘absolute’ (or ‘monistic’) idealism. The critique of materialism is developed at considerable length in the first series of Gifford Lectures, Naturalism and Agnosticism. Ward observes here that the view of reality as a system of inert material particles subject to strict deterministic laws cannot explain the world’s contingency, a fundamental aspect of experienced reality that needs to be taken at face value. Moreover, materialism fails to provide an adequate ontology for biology, for it cannot explain the emergence of life from lifeless matter. The doctrine is also inconsistent with the latest development of physics, which is moving away from the seventeenth-century, Democritean conception of the atom as an inert particle—a microscopic, indivisible ‘thing.’