III. — TIME AND THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC. (II.)
By J. Ellis McTaggart.
At the end of the first part of this paper (Mind of October
last) we had arrived at the conclusion that the conception of
the dialectic process as eternally realised involved the
assertion that the universe was fundamentally perfect, and that
Hegel’s attempt to explain away the obvious imperfection
around us, by treating it as a delusion, had failed to bring
the perfection of reality, and the imperfection of appearance,
into harmony with one another.
Is there any other method which might be more successful? Can the denial of the ultimate reality of time, which caused the difficulty, by rendering it necessary to take the dialectic as eternally realised, be made to cure the wound which it has itself made? Would it not be possible, it might be said, to escape from our dilemma in this way? The dialectic itself teaches us that it is only the concrete whole which is completely rational, and that any abstraction from it, by the very fact that it is an abstraction, must be to some degree false and contradictory. An attempt to take reality, moment by moment, element by element, must make it appear imperfect. The complete rationality is only in the whole which transcends all these elements, and any one of them, considered as more or less independent, must be false. Now, if we look at the universe as in time, it will appear to be a succession of events, so that only part of it is existing at any given instant, the rest being either past or future. Each of these events will be represented as real in itself, and not merely as a moment in a real whole. And in so far as events in time are taken to be, as such, real, it must follow that reality does not appear rational. If an organic whole — and such we have taken the universe to be — is perfect, then any one of its parts, taken separately from the whole, cannot possibly be perfect. For in such a whole all the parts presuppose one another, and any one, taken by itself, must bear the traces of its isolation and incompleteness. And not only each event, but the whole universe taken as a series of events, would thus appear imperfect. Even if such a series could ever be complete, it could not fully represent the reality, since the parts would still, by their existence in time, be isolated from one another, and claim some amount
