  McTaggart’s realism about relations seems to be a relatively mild realism: he believes in the existence of relations, and grants that statements attributing relations to things might be true to the fullest degree, but it is not clear the extent to which he believed that facts about the obtainings of relations were metaphysically  basic.[32] It is true that the notion of perception, which is on the face of it a relational notion, plays a fundamental role in his idealistic system. Recall that McTaggart held that reality consists of immaterial selves that are unified by perceiving each other. What is not clear is whether McTaggart believed that whenever some x perceives some y, it is virtue of the intrinsic qualities of x and y. (In one sense of the term “intrinsic relation”, perception would be an intrinsic relation if this claim were true.)