68 THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS 



products of thinking regarded as a special faculty which, 

 compared with experience, deals only with abstractions. 

 They are nothing but thoughts. Against attributing to 

 them any kind of existential reality, Dr. Ward offers the 

 most uncompromising opposition. It is, he believes, a 

 cardinal error of Natural Science, to assert, for instance, 

 that Laws of Nature exist ; or that they have a place 

 among, or above, real things, and their particular, inces- 

 santly repeated activities. ' ' Laws of Nature " are only 

 general ideas invented by scientific men for the purposes 

 of explanation. It is on the unreality or pure ideality of 

 Universals, that Dr. Ward relies in order to free the moral 

 and religious consciousness from the fear of inexorable 

 law and mechanical necessity. For why should we 

 fear them when they are only the products of our 

 own thought ? 



But are these universal thoughts merely false ideas? 

 Are the necessary relations which reason must have if its 

 experience is not to be purely contingent and chaotic, mere 

 fictitious creatures of our minds ? No ! replies Dr. Ward. 

 They are not true in the sense that universal thoughts 

 point to, or stand for, universal entities ; or that things- 

 in-general actually exist, and correspond to general ideas. 

 All reality consists of particular things and their particular 

 activities. Nevertheless, although these universal ideas are 

 not true, they are " valid." Although they are "necessary 

 truths," they are not truths of fact, but "truths of 

 reason." l 



Nothing, it seems to me, indicates more clearly the straits 

 in which this theory finds itself than this attempt to dis- 

 tinguish between true ideas and valid ideas. And to say 



1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, p. 283. 



