  McTaggart more or less interpreted Hegel as holding McTaggart’s own view, which is that reality consists of a series of either finitely many or infinitely many persons. Reality is composed of persons and their states, which are parts of them. Each person is perceived by some person or persons, and a person perceives another person either by perceiving the whole person or by perceiving some part of the person. Since, on McTaggart’s view, persons have their perceptions (and other mental states) as proper parts, one way to perceive a person is by perceiving a perception of that  person.[18] Because McTaggart allows that x might perceive a perception of y without y’s perception being also a perception of x, McTaggart distinguishes between perceiving a perception (or, more generally, any mental state) and having that perception (or, more generally, having that mental  state).[19]