preëminently so. (See my pp. 330 seq., 363, and 373). Eternity, self-existence, self-activity, freedom, and infinity are to me all interchangeable terms, and are so treated wherever they turn up in the course of the book. My reviewer falls into a non sequitur when he concludes that I make God finite because I make him one of a community of spirits, each absolutely real; not God’s finitude, but his definiteness, is what follows from that. This confusion of the definite with the finite is very comm.on, and is the explanation of two tendencies in sceptical thinking — the tendency to deny the personality of God, whose infinity is supposed to mean his utter indefiniteness, and the tendency, in recoil from the former, to assert God's finitude in order to save his personality, which of course must be definite. But the true infinite, as distinguished from the pseudo-infinite, the infinite of quality in contrast to the infinite of quantity, is entirely definite; more definite, indeed, than any finite can be.
(3) Mr. McTaggart misconstrues my various statements about the imperfection in all spirits other than God. He supposes me to hold this imperfection to be incompatible with their being perfect in any sense whatever, and he mildly blames me for overlooking the classic distinction between the view sub specie æterni and the view sub specie temporis, whereby the seeming contradiction involved in an imperfect-perfect might be reconciled. But my actual doctrine about the spirits other than God is exactly his own. “Sub specie æternitatis, every self is perfect; sub specie temporis, it is progressing towards a perfection as yet unattained,” he says. And the very quotation from me on which he bases his criticism (see my p. 363) expresses this, almost in open words: “The personality of every soul lies precisely in the relation . . . between that genuine infinity (self-activity) which marks its organising essence, and the finitude . . . to which the infinity [only
