rt is an Idealist; he
recognizes the {97} impossibility of matter without mind. For him
nothing exists but spirits, but he does not recognize the necessity for
any one all-embracing or controlling Spirit: the only spirits in his
Universe are limited minds like those of men and animals. He differs,
then, from the Pluralist of the type just mentioned in getting rid of the
hypothesis of a personal God side by side with and yet controlling the
uncreated spirits. And he differs further from all Pluralists in not
treating the separate spirits as so many centres of consciousness quite
independent of, and possibly at war with, all the rest: the spirits form
part of an ordered system: the world is a unity, though that unity is not
the unity which belongs to self-consciousness. He recognizes, in the
traditional language of Philosophy, an Absolute, but this Absolute is not
a single spiritual Being but a Society: or, if it is to be called a
single spiritual Being, it is a Being which exists or manifests itself
only in a plurality of limited consciousnesses.

This scheme is, I admit, more reasonable than Pluralism. It does,
nominally at least, recognize the world as an ordered system. It gets
rid of the difficulty of accounting for the apparent order of the Cosmos
as the result of a struggle between independent wills. It is not, upon
its author's pre-suppositions, a gratuitous theory: for a mind which
accepts Idealism and rejects Theism it is the only {98} intelligible
alternative. But I must confess that it seems to me open to most of the
difficulties which I have endeavoured to point out in Pluralism, and to
some others. In the first place, there is one, to my mind, great and
insuperable difficulty about it. As an Idealist, Dr. McTaggart has to
admit that the whole physical world, in so far as it exists at all, must
exist in and for some consciousness. Now, not only is there, according
to him, no single mind in which the system can exist as a whole, but even
all the minds together do not apparently know the whole of it, or (so far
as our knowledge goes) ever will. The undiscovered and unknown part of
the Universe is then non-existent. And yet, be it noticed, the known
part of the world does not make a perfectly articulated or (if you like
the phrase) organic system without the unknown part. It is only on the
assumption of relations between what we know and what we don't know that
we can regard it as an orderly, intell