This scheme is, I admit, more reasonable than Pluralism. It does, nominally at least, recognize the world as an ordered system. It gets rid of the difficulty of accounting for the apparent order of the Cosmos as the result of a struggle between independent wills. It is not, upon its author's pre-suppositions, a gratuitous theory: for a mind which accepts Idealism and rejects Theism it is the only {98} intelligible alternative. But I must confess that it seems to me open to most of the difficulties which I have endeavoured to point out in Pluralism, and to some others. In the first place, there is one, to my mind, great and insuperable difficulty about it. As an Idealist, Dr. McTaggart has to admit that the whole physical world, in so far as it exists at all, must exist in and for some consciousness. Now, not only is there, according to him, no single mind in which the system can exist as a whole, but even all the minds together do not apparently know the whole of it, or (so far as our knowledge goes) ever will. The undiscovered and unknown part of the Universe is then non-existent. And yet, be it noticed, the known part of the world does not make a perfectly articulated or (if you like the phrase) organic system without the unknown part. It is only on the assumption of relations between what we know and what we don't know that we can regard it as an orderly, intelligible system at all. Therefore, if part of the system is non-existent, the whole system--the system as a whole--must be treated as non-existent. The world is, we are told, a system; and yet as a system it has (upon the hypothesis) no real existence. The systematic whole does not exist in matter, for to Dr. McTaggart matter is merely the experience of Mind. What sort of existence, then, can an undiscovered planet possess till it is {99} discovered? For Dr. McTaggart has not provided any mind or minds in and for which it is to exist. At one time, indeed, Dr. McTaggart seemed disposed to accept a suggestion of mine that, on his view, each soul must be omniscient; and to admit that, while in its temporal aspect, each soul is limited and fallible in its knowledge, it is at the same time supertemporally omniscient. That is a conception difficult beyond all the difficulties of the most arbitrary and self-contradicting of orthodox patristic or scholastic speculations. But, as Dr. McTaggart does not now seem disposed to insist upon that point, I will say no more about it except that to my mind it is a theory which defies all intellectual grasp. It can be stated; it cannot be thought.