J. MCTAGGART E. MCTAGGART, Some Dogmas of Religion. 543 system of selves in its entirety. And, again, an omniscient person might very probably be though it is not certain that he would be a person of such power and goodness as to be rightly called God. "But I cannot see that it is at all necessary for an Idealist to admit that nothing can exist except that which is for a mind, in other words, except that which is known. There is, no doubt, a school of Idealism which maintains this. It has been maintained that to Be is to be Perceived, or that to Be is to be Thought. To such Idealism, certainly, Dr. Eashdall's argument applies. If all reality is a system, and if only that has being which is known, then some person must know the system, and so know all reality. "There is, however, another form of Idealism the form which seems to me to be true which is not liable to these criticisms. This form of Idealism does not say that nothing can be real except what is known. It says that nothing can exist but persons con- scious beings, who know, will, and feel. . . . " Now if we take this view, there seems no difficulty at all in saying that certain aspects of reality are unknown to every one. The theory maintains that nothing exists but persons connected in a unity. Accordingly, whatever exists must either be a conscious person, or *a quality belonging to him, or an event happening to him, or else it must be one of those relations which connect these persons, and make up their unity. In the latter case, while it does not actually fall within any one person, it involves a quality which does. For if A and B are in relation, then A has the quality of being related to B, and B has the quality of being related to A. Thus there is no reality which cannot be expressed in a proposition about conscious persons. ... In these cases something must be true about a person which he does not himself know, and in this event the form of Idealism which we are now discussing can offer no opposition to its being true without any one knowing it " (pp. 250-253). Now I quite agree with Dr. McTaggart's representation of Idealism as the belief that "nothing can exist but persons con- scious beings, who know, will and feel ". Matter is no doubt ulti- mately, in so far as it has any real existence, the experience of a person or persons. But after all Matter as an object of thought has got to be accounted for. Our Eeason compels us to believe that things of which we have not had experience have some kind of existence. Every inference of Science implies the previous existence of things which were till then unknown and unexperienced by the individual thinker. And Dr. McTaggart admits that on his view they may not have been known or experienced by any other spirit whatever. Their actual existence in the past, as also the existence in the present of that part of the world which is at present unknown to any human or similarly limited spirit, is therefore reduced to a merely potential or hypothetical existence. The real meaning of saying that this planet was once in a gaseous condition
