Lotze and Ward on the Place of Mind in Nature

This paper addresses Lotze’s influence on James Ward’s panpsychism and offers a brief assessment of their views. Both Lotze and Ward endorse a strong version of panpsychism, namely pure mentalism, according to which the constituents of reality deceptively appear to be material while in fact they are purely mental. Section 1 presents Ward’s own version of pure mentalism as an attempt to improve on Lotze’s. Section 2 argues that this attempt fails and raises some difficulties for pure mentalism in general. Section 3 sketches an alternative metaphysical view, on which mind and matter are both essentially distinct and essentially inseparable.