 This double task cannot be settled by a priori means but has to be approached by starting from empirical assumptions based on experience. If one has to acknowledge that the ways we are bound to conceive of all these experiential or phenomenal characteristics lead to contradictions then these characteristics cannot be true of reality. McTaggart’s strategy here is strongly reminiscent of Bradley’s procedure to downgrade many phenomena to appearances and to deny them the status of constitutive elements of reality. The empirically given characteristics McTaggart discusses primarily are (a) time, (b) matter, (c) sensa, (d) spirit and (e) cogitation. As to (a) time he denies that “anything existent [can] possess the characteristic of being in time” (NE §303) where time is understood as an ordering relation between events. He distinguishes between two ways of ordering in time. The first gives rise to what he calls the “A-series” according to which every state of affairs (event, thing) is either past or present or future. The second, the so-called “B-series”, relates transitively and asymmetrically states of affairs in terms of earlier and later (cf. NE §306). He claims that the A-series is more fundamental than the B-series because only the A-series can account for change (NE §317) and goes on to demonstrate that (a) the A-series and the B-series contradict each other in the sense that they belong together though they are incompatible (cf. NE §333) and that (b) the (more fundamental) A-series leads to time determinations of a state of affairs that are contradictory. The result: 