Some Dogmas of Religion

Some Dogmas of Religion is the book through which Evan Michaels encounters a philosophical argument for pre-existence that resonates with his experience of reincarnation, while leaving intact his doubts about karma. It matters both as an intellectual framework and as a deliberate test: Poppy uses Evan’s unusual response to its notoriously dry prose to recognize a likeness between them.

Presentation and discovery

Antonio brings Evan three aged volumes along with fruit: The Critique of Pure Reason, The Collected Poems of John Donne, and Some Dogmas of Religion. The McTaggart book is the newest of the three, though it looks like a college textbook from the 1950s. Its unpromising appearance and title lead Evan to expect dull reading. At first, the book seems to confirm that expectation: its sections on religion and dogma strike him as dry.

The setting sharpens the contrast between the book’s plain, forbidding surface and its eventual effect. Evan reads in a small, windowless room in the church, while rain pounds the roof and lightning flashes through stained glass. Donne’s poems suit the storm, but Evan finds that McTaggart is the volume that keeps his attention. By the time he has read 120 pages, he is searching its bibliography for related books. The change is not a sudden discovery of an easy or entertaining style; it is the attraction of an argument that has reached a question he urgently wants to consider.

McTaggart’s argument

The book’s decisive turn comes with its treatment of human immortality, followed by human pre-existence. Evan identifies McTaggart as a metaphysician and Cambridge lecturer around the turn of the twentieth century, and notes that he believed in reincarnation. The argument presented in the volume addresses how a person might attain intellectual and moral perfection if death does not immediately bring that perfection. McTaggart considers the possibility of a sudden improvement at death, then proposes gradual improvement continuing after the present body has died: “The first is that some tremendous improvement -an improvement out of all proportion to any which can ever be observed in life- takes place at the moment of death.” He describes continued improvement after death as the more probable alternative.

That alternative leads to a plurality of lives rather than a single earthly life. McTaggart’s account requires at least three lives—the present one, a preceding one, and a succeeding one—and allows for a longer series of past lives. He supports the idea of pre-existence by explaining innate skills and propensities as abilities known or practiced in an earlier life. A person’s character, in this account, is also shaped by experiences from previous lives that the person no longer remembers. These claims connect the book’s abstract metaphysics to two features that matter directly to Evan: the persistence of life across deaths and capacities whose origins lie beyond conscious memory.

Evan’s response and reservations

Evan has already read widely about reincarnation since realizing that his experience is unusual. He finds aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism appealing, but cannot fully embrace their account because he cannot accept karma as a governing principle. Nothing in what he has experienced across three lives, he says, supports the idea of karmic debt. McTaggart’s argument therefore offers a point of contact without simply confirming a complete religious system: it treats plurality of lives and inherited propensities as intelligible, but the evidence presented here does not show that Evan accepts every part of the book’s philosophy.

His response becomes visible when Poppy asks what interested him in the book. Evan calls it fascinating and says it is unlike anything he has read in Western philosophy. He does not immediately explain the full significance of the argument; instead, he studies her face and delays his answer over breakfast. The exchange suggests that the book has given him more than an abstract subject to discuss: its ideas touch on experiences he has not yet openly disclosed.

Use as a test

Poppy later explains that she used the book to draw Evan out. She had suspected that he was like her, and his intense response removed her remaining doubt. In her judgment, McTaggart’s stilted, dry writing is so difficult that staying up all night with it is itself revealing. The book functions, then, not only through what it argues but through the peculiar kind of reader it attracts. Evan’s absorption becomes evidence that he recognizes something in the subject, even before he tells Poppy what he knows about his own past.

The test is part of a broader pattern of clues: Poppy also recognizes the old cigarette slogan “Centuries of Flavor,” which had changed before Evan’s present birth. She says the book was bait to draw out a further reaction, and that his response settled the question for her. The volume thus links philosophical content to recognition between characters. It offers Evan language for thinking about unremembered lives, while its very difficulty helps Poppy identify him as someone whose interest is personal rather than casual.