  In addition to the family’s economic difficulties, Ward’s youth was shaped by the narrow Calvinistic faith in which he was raised. In 1863 he entered Spring Hill College (later incorporated in Mansfield College, Oxford) with the aim of becoming a minister, but became increasingly skeptical of the doctrines he was expected to preach. In the middle of his religious crisis, Ward moved to Germany for a temporary period of study. In Göttingen, he attended lectures by one of the most influential philosophers of the time, Rudolf Hermann Lotze. It is probably from Lotze that Ward gained a first substantial appreciation of the philosophy of Leibniz, whose theory of monads was later to provide the basis of his own metaphysics.