Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/558

 544 CBITICAL NOTICES : is that centuries afterwards spirits l then already in existence would come to think that, had they been there, they would have found it impossible to stand upon, very hot, and so on. Is this enough to satisfy the demand that our thought shall be true of an objective Reality ? Does it not make our belief in the existence of Matter a delusion? I am not very fond of the phrase "subjective Idealism " as a term of abuse, for I find that, if it means anything but Sensationalism (from any taint of which Dr. McTaggart is certainly free), it is a term usually applied to all genuine Idealists by those Idealists who are not really prepared to face the difficulties of their professed system. But it does seem to me that those diffi- culties which Idealists usually dispose of by saying that they are only applicable to subjective Idealism exist in Dr. McTaggart's system to an exaggerated degree. I do not say that Dr. McTag- gart's system involves a positive logical contradiction : but of all the possible ways of accounting for the facts of the Universe that are not capable^ of direct refutation, it seems to me the clumsiest and the most difficult assuredly far more difficult than the Idealism which secures objective existence for the objects of our knowledge, even when and so far as they are unknown to any human being,, by regarding them as existing in the experience of a single Spirit. A full development of the argument for my own view and against Dr. McTaggart's would consist chiefly in bringing out these diffi- culties. I should insist particularly on the difficulty of holding that whatever exists (when not a person or a quality belonging to him or an event happening to him) " must be one of those relations which connect those persons, and make up their unity " (p. 252)_ since that involves the idea of a reality consisting (in part) of rela- tions both terms of which are known to no mind whatever. One of the traditional arguments for Idealism has been that Eelation enters into the very being of the things we know, and that we- cannot attribute any intelligible meaning to the idea of a relation which has its existence otherwise than in a mind. This is an argument which Dr. McTaggart could not use ; and, by giving it up, he weakens, as it seems to me, very seriously the case for his own idealistic creed, while involving himself in a position which most Idealists would find unthinkable. If it is difficult with the Materialist to think of an unthought relation as existing " in " a matter which is unthinking and unthought, I do not find it easier to understand a relation known to nobody between one term which is present to one mind and another which is present to another. I must not now develop further the difficulties at which I have hinted. But I must briefly notice that in one respect and per- haps one respect alone Dr. McTaggart has not done justice to his opponents. Most of those who hold the Theistic Idealism which 1 Of course these spirits might already have known something about a planet which they did not yet inhabit, but I do not understand Dr. McTaggart that all or any of them were omniscient then any more than now.