j. MCTAGGART E. McTAGGAKT, Some Dogmas of Religion. 537 looked. In the next chapter, Dr. McTaggart argues that the belief in Immortality is easier with a belief in pre-existence than without it. There is perhaps no great novelty in his arguments : it will be enough to say that the writer makes the most of his case. It may be unphilosophical, but I confess that no arguments that I have read succeed in removing the prima facie impression of something phantastic in schemes of pre-existence. Take such a passage as the following (p. 121) : " On the theory of pre-existence such relations would naturally be explained by the friendships of past lives. The love which comes- at first sight, and the love which grows up through many years in this life, would be referred to similar causes, whose similarity would account for the similarity of the effects. Each would have arisen through long intimacy, and the only difference between them would be that in one case the intimacy had been suspended by death and rebirth." I confess that I see no a priori reason why one should not love really at first sight as well as "from long intimacy," nor does it- make the phenomenon any more intelligible to me to be told that the subject of it had a previous acquaintance with the man or woman in another state. The body at all events must be in all probability different, and why should the present body have such a. marked attraction for a man who had never seen that body before, and had forgotten his previous acquaintance with the soul in another state ? Dr. McTaggart is sobar and restrained in his specula- tions compared with some of those who have attempted to maintain the thesis of pre-existence Renouvier for instance ; and yet he does not altogether to my mind remove the impression that the theory of pre-existence involves us in a great deal of what one is- tempted to call Mythology. I admit that Dr. McTaggart would score a dialectical victory if he challenged me to define what I mean by Mythology, and to show that his beliefs involve Mythology while mine do not. I mean the remark to stand simply as the expression of a personal impression, not as a refutation. The chapter on Free-will seems to me perhaps the most convinc- ing argument against Indeterminism and for " Self-Determinism '" which I have ever read. It is also the clearest and most intelligible : for, clear as is Schopenhauer's treatise on the subject, we are told at. the end of it that, though phenomenal freedom is an illusion, we are still to believe in " noumenal freedom," and for the explanation of that we are simply referred to Kant. The only possible criticism that I see upon the chapter is that any one reading it with no previous knowledge and no previous prejudices would probably think that the subject was wholly free from difficulty. In the next chapter, on "God as Omnipotent," Dr. McTaggart comes to close quarters with his problem. With the chapter as a- whole I find myself in complete sympathy. Sometimes, perhaps, the argument is pushed a little too hard. To call God's inability to-
