52 J. ELLIS MCTAGGART : nothing, that I can see, to do with the course of the argu- ment before or after them, but it is manifest at once that they are closely analogous to chemical processes. I do not venture to rechristen the amended category. But I will point out that a good example of it might be found in Hegel's own exposition of the Hindu religion. Here all the multiplicity and differentiation of the world is referred to and accounted for by a unity so abstract as to explain nothing, and in reality to be nothing for the difference between such a Pantheism as this and Bouddha's Atheism is infinitesimal. Such a blank unity is totally unable to explain the plurality, and accordingly is only really prominent in those moods of the worshipper when he can fix his entire attention on the unity of things, ignoring their differences. When the latter are to be taken into account, he has to regard some sort of difference as fundamental, thus going back to the category of Absolute Mechanism. And, because the unity declines to admit the reality of this difference, it is impotent to control it in any way. It is, as Hegel points out, for this reason that a religion which is on one side the most restrained and rigid monism, is on the other the wildest and most unrestrained polytheism. 1 We have seen, then, that our attempts to make either differentiation or unity fundamental by itself have broken down. Reality is a differentiated unity or a unified plu- rality, and neither element can be deduced from the other. We must therefore adopt a theory of reality which puts both elements on the same level, and makes them both funda- mental. Reality must be a unity differentiated into plurality, for which the differentiation and the plurality are as essential and necessary as the unity. Or it can be expressed from the other end reality is a plurality combined into a unity, for which the combination and the unity are as essential and necessary as the plurality. This gives us the category which Hegel calls TELEOLOGY. The advance in this category on the two which precede it does not lie in its recognising the existence of both unity and multiplicity. For Mechanism recognises, admittedly, a unity as well as a plurality, and I have endeavoured to show that Chemism recognises a plurality as well as a unity. The difference is that the two lower categories take, each of them, 1 Philosophy of Religion (Werke, vol. xi., p. 380. Speirs' trans., vol. ii., p. 44).
