Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/49

 inherent in appearance.” For faint as is the hope which nourishes this belief, and groundless as are the assumptions from which that hope may, I think, be shown to spring, one may yet congratulate Mr McTaggart on the candour with which he distinguishes his faith in the Unknown Synthesis from the cogency of a logical demonstration, and on the diffidence with which he declines to avail himself of Mr Bradley’s convenient maxim to the effect that “what may be, and must be, that certainly is.” For certainly, if one does not scruple to regard utter ignorance as the possibility that ’may be,’ and the subjective need of saving one’s own theory as the necessity that ‘must be,’ there is no difficulty which cannot be evaded by the application of that maxim and no contradiction which cannot be so ‘reconciled.’ My only fear would be that if such an axiom were admitted at the beginning of philosophy, it would also prove its end. Mr McTaggart, however, is to be congratulated on having eschewed the dangers of Mr Bradley’s ‘short way with the insoluble,’ and on preferring to base his acceptance of conflicting views on the ancient, time-honored and extra-logical principle of Faith. Still more admirable, perhaps, is the robustness of a faith, which overlooks the curious inconsistency of denying the metaphysical value of Time, and yet expecting from the Future the discovery of the ultimate synthesis on which one’s whole metaphysic depends. For myself I avow that such faith is beyond my reach. If I were driven to the conclusion that the inexorable necessities of my mental constitution directly conflicted with patent and undeniable facts of experience, I fear I should be beset by a sceptical distrust of the ultimate rationality of all things rather than solaced by the vision of an “unknown synthesis.”

But in this case I hope to show that there is no need to respect a faith one cannot share, and that Mr McTaggart has given more to faith than faith demands.

If the contradiction cannot be solved, it can at least be exposed and explained. And unless I am very much mistaken, it will appear that the incompatibility between the assertion of the reality of the Time-process, and its comprehension by any system of ‘eternal’ logical truth (whether Hegel’s or anybody else’s) has its origin in very simple and obvious considerations.

Mr McTaggart cannot find room for the reality of the Time-process, i.e. of the world’s changes in time and space, within the limits of Hegel’s Dialectic. But is this an exclusive peculiarity or difficulty of Hegel’s position? Is the Time-process any more intelligible on the assumptions of any other purely logical system, as for instance on those of Plato or Spinoza? I think the difficulty will be found to recur in all these systems. And