Despite the unreality of time, McTaggart argued, there is an important sense in which it is true to say that individual persons are immortal, and that they are reincarnated in a succession of (apparent) bodies. He also held that in reality persons stand in relations either of direct perception, and consequently love, or of indirect perception, and consequently affection, to one another. Love is, indeed, the basically real emotional state. There is, however, no God in this heavenly city, for McTaggart did not think there is any reason to believe that there is or even can be an overarching mind that includes individual minds like ours but is still in some sense an individual mind itself. McTaggart was, in addition, a determinist, though he held that determinism is not incompatible with the existence of valid judgments of moral obligation.
On these basic points McTaggart never changed his mind. He argued in support of them both in his early writings on G. W. F. Hegel and in his great systematic work, The Nature of Existence. The main difference between his earlier and his later work is that in the former the arguments are dialectical in a Hegelian manner, whereas in the latter they are more straightforwardly deductive.
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