III. — THE METAPHYSICS OF THE TIME-PROCESS.
By F. C. S. Schiller.
I do not know whether Mr McTaggart’s interesting
investigation (Mind, vol. ii. N. S. 490-504, vol. iii. 190-207) of the
relations of the Hegelian Dialectic to Time (or rather to the
Time-process[1]) has obtained the attention it merits, but the
problem he has so ably handled is of such vital importance, and
the attitude of current philosophy towards it is so obscure, that
no apology is needed for a further discussion of his results. That
those results came upon me with the shock of novelty I cannot,
indeed, pretend; for the impossibility of reconciling the truth of
the Dialectic with the reality of the Time-process has long been
familiar to me as the chief, and, to me, insuperable difficulty of
the Hegelian position. I propose, therefore, to take for granted
the reluctant conclusion of Sir McTaggart’s almost scholastic
ingenuity, namely that there is no known way of reconciling
the (admitted) existence of the Time-process with the (alleged)
“eternal perfection of the Absolute Idea” — at all events until
some other commentator of Hegelism has attempted to revise
and refute Mr McTaggart’s arguments — and I wish to consider
what inferences may be drawn from it with respect to the
method of metaphysical speculation in general.
Before doing so, however, I ought, perhaps, to say a word on what Mr McTaggart himself inclines to regard as the positive result of his inquiry, the fact namely that he has not been able to show that there is no possible synthesis of the Absolute Idea with the Time-process, and that he is consequently “entitled to believe that one more synthesis remains as yet unknown, which shall overcome the last and most persistent of the contradictions
- ↑ I prefer to use the latter phrase in order to indicate that I do not regard “Time” as anything but an abstraction formed to express an ultimate characteristic of our experience, and in order to check, if possible, the tendency of metaphysicians to substitute verbal criticism of that abstraction for a consideration of the facts which we mean when we say e.g. that “the world is in Time.” Of that tendency, I fear, even Mr McTaggart cannot always be acquitted (e.g. pp. 493-5), and it seems to me to be at the root of most of the metaphysical puzzles on the subject.
