Ward concludes his analysis of Abolition with reflections on how it might be understood in our time. The very point, he states, of untying the various threads that bind Lewis's text together is to produce a synthesis and therefore greater understanding of the book's unified meaning. This is particularly important, according to Ward, because Abolition's key motif that there are self-evident truths ("the Tao") within which we live, move, and have our being is very hard for even sympathetically-inclined contemporary students to grasp.

Ward contends that Abolition "doesn't spend enough time explaining [this] paradigmatic issue and driving it home securely." I'm inclined to agree. But I also think that Abolition has proved very effective at alerting several generations of readers to the very idea that there is a substantive case to suggest that 1) humans don't somehow create morality and 2) the human mind itself bears the imprint of a universal natural morality that doesn't change. As Ward states, "we are already in the Tao, and always remain within it, often without realizing it, whether we like it or not."

This claim is one that, Lewis showed, has been expressed in different ways and with varying degrees of specificity and coherence in all the world's major civilizations. But it is also a proposition that, I think it is fair to say, achieved its most sophisticated and dynamic expression in Western culture. And that is precisely why the West is especially vulnerable when the Tao, or what Wards calls "the immemorial Way, the nexus of practical reason that surrounds and supports all human beings and summons them to ethical maturity," ends up being denied. That is Lewis's warning to us today, and one which Ward's After Humanity provides us with a fresh understanding of why a world without Logos and full of men without chests is a frightening one indeed.