inquiring whether reality can have the characteristics it appears to have in experience (notably being temporal and material) given his earlier conclusions about what reality must really be like in Absolute Reality. In the introduction to the 2nd Volume of The Nature of Existence, he says: Starting from our conclusions as to the general nature of the existent, as reached in the earlier Books, we shall have to ask, firstly which of these characteristics can really be possessed by what is existent, and which of them, in spite of the primâ facie appearance to the contrary, cannot be possessed by anything existent (1927: sect. 295).And he continues:It will be possible to show that, having regard to the general nature of the existent as previously determined, certain characteristics, that we consider here for the first time, cannot be true of the existent (1927: sect. 298).As Ingthorsson notes, the most central result of McTaggart's earlier inquiry into the general nature of the existent in Absolute Reality, an inquiry McTaggart claims is based entirely on a priori arguments (i.e. such as do not rely on any empirical observations), is that existence and reality coincide and have no degrees: either something exists and thus is real, or it does not. It immediately follows that for the future and past to be real, they must exist. This is why he interprets the statement "M is present, has been future, and will be past" as a statement about M existing in the present bearing the property of being present, and existing in the past bearing the property of being future, and existing in the future bearing the property of being past. This interpretation of the expression, if correct, does say that M is future, present, and past, which is contradictory. However, since it starts from the premise that the future and past can only be real by existing, then it remains to show that this is what the A-view of time assumes. The C-series Having come to the conclusion that reality can neither form an A- nor a B-series, despite appearances to the contrary, then McTaggart finds it necessary to explain what the world is really like such that it appears to be different from what it appears to be. Here is where the C-series comes into play. McTaggart does not say much about the C-series in the original journal article, but in The Nature of