We cannot make a judgment without Universals, and in a Universal much of the detail which exists even in our actual sensitive experience (to say nothing of an all-embracing experience) is necessarily left out. Every inference implies that we do not know already and immediately what we infer, and the inferred knowledge is a knowledge of what our experience would be in certain circumstances, while as a matter of fact we have not, and never, it may be, shall have that experience. We cannot suppose that in God the "that" and the "what" are thus divided; and yet we are forced to say that in the Divine Mind[1] "knowledge" and "feeling" are "somehow" combined. That "somehow" is no doubt a phrase which has been shockingly abused as a means for requiring us to swallow propositions which our Reason pronounces to be incompatible; but still in an attempt at an intellectual construction of the Universe we can none of us get on without it, not even Dr. McTaggart. In the same way I should fully admit that to say that God cannot do something which his Goodness would prompt him to do, and that he wills things in themselves evil as the means to the greatest attainable Good is an inadequate representation of the facts. But that is the only way of putting the matter which is possible to us. "Goodness" and "Power" are two aspects of God's Nature: we can only reconcile the dictates of our moral consciousness with the facts of life by holding that the one is limited, while the other is not. And is Dr. McTaggart's way a better one? It is true the goodness of his Absolute is not unlimited, but still it is very much in excess of its performances. Human beings are good enough to wish that the Universe were better than it is. Why is it not better? He can only reply that the nature of things—the nature of that Absolute which is made up of finite spirits—prevents its being so. It is true that the power of each of these is limited by the nature of the others: but it is also limited in part by its own nature. And by what is the whole limited? By what except its own nature? Why is one Mind unable to do all that its goodness would prompt it to do more difficult to conceive than a number of minds which, collectively and as a system, constitute all the Reality that there is, and yet, each of them individually and all of them collectively, unable to do all the good that they would like to do? There is the same collision between Power and Goodness in Dr. McTaggart's Universe that there is in the Universe of the Theist. All power must, according to Dr. McTaggart, reside in these spirits, and yet they cannot realise their own highest ideals: like the Theist, Dr. McTaggart is compelled to say that one aspect of the ultimate Reality prevents its being or doing what another aspect of that Reality would lead us to suppose that it would be or do.
So again, when Dr. McTaggart goes on to argue that it is not possible "that one member of a society should be completely
- ↑ Of course I am here bound to assume the validity of arguments which Dr. McTaggart does not recognise; the assumption is partly justified below.
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