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 j. MCTAGGART E. MCTAGGART, Some Dogmas of Religion. 545 he is examining rest their case largely upon the contention that the idea of Causality is unintelligible apart from a Will. The suc- cessive events of the world which are in Dr. McTaggart's view ultimately the successive experiences of spirits must have a cause. Certainly many of them are not caused by the will of the spirits to which they occur or (so far as Dr. McTaggart's system requires us to believe) by the will of any Spirit. Hence on his system they are uncaused and unintelligible. Of course the ultimate Eeality whether that Eeality consists of one Spirit which has no beginning and others which have a beginning, or whether it consists in a Society of Spirits all unbeginning must be uncaused. But in Dr. McTaggart's system there are events which have a beginning and yet are uncaused. Dr. McTaggart would probably not accept the Metaphysic which recognises no true cause other than Will, but the whole aspect of the problem is fundamentally altered for those who hold that belief. If on other grounds theistic and what we may call social Idealism were equally probable, this consideration would by itself decide me in favour of the former. If the events not caused by human wills are caused by will at all, it is enor- mously easier to account for the unity of plan which the Universe exhibits as due to a single Mind and Will than as the result of the joint activity (a result hardly conceivable without previous delibera- tion) of many minds, each of them of limited power and limited knowledge ; even apart from the fact that the ordinary phenomena of Nature are obviously not due to the action of any spirits with which we are directly acquainted. The hypothesis of many such wills, to say the very least of it, offends against the maxim, " Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ". No doubt Dr. McTaggart is not technically a Pluralist : his Universe is a system. But so after all it is, or may be, for the Materialist. But for the Materialist it is a merely accidental or fortuitous system : it is simply an ultimate fact that the Universe happens to be of a kind which is found to be capable of being reduced to and understood as a system by the minds which it chances to evolve : what happens in it has nothing to do with the fact of its intelligibility or its systematic character. It is "rational " in the sense that it is capable of being understood ; it is not rational in the sense of its being planned or organised by any mind : it does not express the idea of any mind nor is it grasped as a whole by any mind. Is the unity of Dr. McTag- gart's world much more intelligible than that of the Materialists? He might reply no doubt that on the Theist's view God is not the result of any plan or idea. Every system must start with an uncaused Being or Beings, but in Dr. McTaggart's view it is a world of successive changes which is declared to be a "system," and yet which does not owe its existence to any mind, or present itself as a system to any mind, and which is not caused even by the minds which partially grasp it as a system. It is not merely a Being who is unexplained, but changes or events which are said to form a system, though they proceed from no mind for which they