may come) to include sin, and only exhibits its perfection in its power to return to wholeness through the process of time.
That I have chiefly dwelt on perfection and imperfection as respectively the attributes of God and of the non-divine minds, without entering into the subtle distinction between kinds of perfection, is indeed a fact, but it should be regarded as a rhetorical rather than a philosophical procedure. That is to say, my book was aimed at readers of general cultivation rather than at metaphysical experts, and so I thought I should carry my new argument for the reality of God more surely home if I kept out of the region of the supersubtile, and relied upon those aspects of the difference between God and other minds which are the most obvious. The point of my argument, in this connexion, is that in God there is a perfection in which there is no imperfection at all, while in every other mind imperfection is present, though undergoing an endless process of cancellation. Of course, subtly analysed, this last means a species of perfection. But again my point is, that the sole possible basis for species in perfection is, primarily, the contrast between absolute perfection (excludent of imperfection) and perfection that embraces and proceeds to reduce imperfection; and, next, the manifold modes of which this second species is susceptible, resting on what I have called (see my pp. 363, 374) the “rate” of adjustment between the infinite (or perfect) and the finite (or defective) aspects of the mental being.
(4) In connexion with my argument for the existence of God, Mr. McTaggart makes this statement: “Among the different grades [of intelligent beings] which . . . are really possible . . . the author assumes that the highest grade of all — that of the ideal Type — is one, and consequently that a being exists who realises the Type. So far as I can see, he does not attempt to prove this.” Just what Mr. McTaggart means by his word “this,” I am in some doubt — whether
