J. M. E. McTaggart

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, commonly John McTaggart or J. M. E. McTaggart (3 September 1866 – 18 January 1925) was an idealist metaphysician. For most of his life McTaggart was a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College. He was an exponent of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and among the most notable of the British idealists.

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Quotes

The really fundamental aspect of the dialectic is not the tendency of the finite category to negate itself but to complete itself.
- Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896), p. 10.

Religion has always, I think, implied a belief in some fundamental harmony, some sort of reconciliation between the claims of our own nature and the facts of the universe.
- Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), p. 9.

On the determinist hypothesis an omnipotent God could have prevented all sin by creating us with better natures and in more favourable surroundings. … Hence we should not be responsible for our sins to God.
- Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), p. 165.

* ... It is clear that if I am a mere effect of my body—a form of its activity—I shall cease when the body ceases. And it is also clear that, if I could not exist without this particular body, then the destruction of the body will be a sign that I have ceased to exist.
But, besides death, there is another characteristic of nature which tends to make us doubt our immortality. Of all things around us, from a pebble to a solar system, science tells us that they are transitory. Each of them arose out of something else, each of them will pass away into something else. What is a man that he should be exempt from this universal law?
- Human Immortality and Pre-existence. London: Longmans, Green & Company. 1915. p. 12.