"Dutiful to the foolish parents first,
Submissive next to the bad husband,--nay,
Tolerant of those meaner miserable
That did his hests, eked out the dole of pain ";[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_., 1052-1055.]

she is found

"Sublime in new impatience with the foe."

"I did for once see right, do right, give tongue
The adequate protest: for a worm must turn
If it would have its wrong observed by God.
I did spring up, attempt to thrust aside
That ice-block 'twixt the sun and me, lay low
The neutralizer of all good and truth."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--Pompilia_, 1591-1596.]

"Yet, shame thus rank and patent, I struck, bare,
At foe from head to foot in magic mail,
And off it withered, cobweb armoury
Against the lightning! 'Twas truth singed the lies
And saved me."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_., 1637-1641.]

Beneath the mature wisdom of the Pope, amidst the ashes of old age,
there sleeps the same fire. He is as truly a warrior priest as
Caponsacchi himself, and his matured experience only muffles his vigour.
Wearied with his life-long labour, we see him gather himself together
"in God's name," to do His will on earth once more with concentrated
might.

"I smite
With my whole strength once more, ere end my part,
Ending, so far as man may, this offence."[C]

[Footnote C: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1958-1960.]

Nor, spite of doubts, the promptings of mercy, the friends plucking his
sleeve to stay his arm, does he fear "to handle a lie roughly"; or
shrink from sending the criminal to his account, though it be but one
day before he himself is called before the judgment seat. The same
energy, the same spirit of bold conflict, animates Guido's adoption of
evil for his good. At all but the last moment of his life of monstrous
crime, just before he hears the echo of the feet of the priests, who
descend the stair to lead him to his death, "he repeats his evil deed in
will."

"Nor is it in me to unhate my hates,--
I use up my last strength to strike once more
Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face,
To trample underfoot the whine and wile
Of beast Violante,--and I grow one gorge
To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale
Poison my hasty hunger took for food."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book_--_Guido_, 2400-2406.]

If there be any concrete form of evil with which the poet's optimism is
not able to cope, any irretrievable black "beyond white's power to
disintensify," it is the refusal to take a definite stand and resolute
for either virtue or vice; the hesitancy and compromise of a life that
is loyal to nothing, not even to its own selfishness. The cool self-love
of the old English moralists, which "reduced the game of life to
principles," and weighed good and evil in the scales of prudence, is to
our poet the deepest damnation.

"Saint Eldobert--I much approve his mode;
With sinner Vertgalant I sympathize;
But histrionic Sganarelle, who prompts
While pulling back, refuses yet concedes,--

*       *       *       *       *

"Surely, one should bid pack that mountebank!"

In him, even

"thickheads ought to recognize
The Devil, that old stager, at his trick
Of general utility, who leads
Downward, perhaps, but fiddles all the way!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Red Cotton Nightcap Country._]

For the bold sinner, who chooses and sustains his part to the end, the
poet has hope. Indeed, the resolute choice is itself the beginning of
hope; for, let a man only give _himself_ to anything, wreak _himself_ on
the world in the intensity of his hate, set all sail before the gusts of
passion and "range from Helen to Elvire, frenetic to be free," let him
rise into a decisive self-assertion against the stable order of the
moral world, and he cannot fail to discover the nature of the task he
has undertaken, and the meaning of the power without, against which he
has set himself. If there be sufficient strength in a man to vent
himself in action, and "try conclusions with the world," he will then
learn that it has another destiny than to be the instrument of evil.
Self-assertion taken by itself is good; indeed, it is the very law of
every life, human and other.

"Each lie
Redounded to the praise of man, was victory
Man's nature had both right to get and might to gain."[B]

[Footnote B: _Fifine at the Fair_, cxxviii.]

But it leads to the revelation of a higher law than that of selfishness.
The very assertion of the self which leads into evil, ultimately leaves
the self assertion futile. There is the disappointment of utter failure;
the sinner is thrown back upon himself empty-handed. He finds himself
subjected, even when sinning,

"To the reign
Of other quite as real a nature, that saw fit
To have its way with man, not man his way with it."[A]

[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_, cxxviii.]

"Poor pabulum for pride when the first love is found
Last also! and, so far from realizing gain,
Each step aside just proves divergency in vain.
The wanderer brings home no profit from his quest
Beyond the sad surmise that keeping house were best
Could life begin anew."[B]

[Footnote B:_Ibid_. cxxix.]

The impossibility of living a divided life, of enjoying at once the
sweets of the flesh on the "Turf," and the security of the "Towers," is
the text of _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_. The sordid hero of the poem
is gradually driven to choose between the alternatives. The best of his
luck, the poet thinks, was the

"Rough but wholesome shock,
An accident which comes to kill or cure,
A jerk which mends a dislocated joint!"[C]

[Footnote C: _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_.]

The continuance of disguise and subterfuge, and the retention of "the
first falsehood," are ultimately made impossible to Léonce Miranda:

"Thus by a rude in seeming--rightlier judged
Beneficent surprise, publicity
Stopped further fear and trembling, and what tale
Cowardice thinks a covert: one bold splash
Into the mid-shame, and the shiver ends,
Though cramp and drowning may begin perhaps."[D]

[Footnote D: _Ibid_.]

In the same spirit he finds Miranda's suicidal leap the best deed
possible for _him_.

"'Mad!' 'No! sane, I say.
Such being the conditions of his life,
Such end of life was not irrational.
Hold a belief, you only half-believe,
With all-momentous issues either way,--
And I advise you imitate this leap,
Put faith to proof, be cured or killed at once!'"[A]

[Footnote A: _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_.]

Thus it is the decisive deed that gains the poet's approval. He finds
the universe a great plot against a pied morality. Even Guido claims
some kind of regard from him, since "hate," as Pompilia said, "was the
truth of him." In that very hate we find, beneath his endless
subterfuges, something real, at last. And since, through his hate, he is
frankly measuring his powers against the good at work in the world,
there cannot remain any doubt of the issue. To bring the rival forces
face to face is just what is wanted.

"I felt quite sure that God had set
Himself to Satan; who would spend
A minute's mistrust on the end?"[B]

[Footnote B:_Count Gismond_.]

It is the same respect for strenuous action and dislike of compromise,
that inspired the pathetic lines in which he condemns the Lost Leader,
who broke "From the van and the free-men, and sunk to the rear and the
slaves." For the good pursues its work without him.

"We shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence;
Songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
_Blot out his name_, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!"[A]

[Footnote A: _The List Leader_.]

Everywhere Browning's ethical teaching has this characteristic feature
of vigorous decisiveness. As Dr. Westcott has said, "No room is left for
indifference or neutrality. There is no surrender to an idle optimism. A
part must be taken and maintained. The spirit in which Luther said
'_Pecca fortiter_' finds in him powerful expression." Browning is
emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood.
His words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man's struggle,
wafted back by the winds, and heard through all the din of conflict by
his meaner brethren, who are obscurely fighting for the good in the
throng and crush of life. We catch the tones of this heart-strengthening
music in the earliest poems he sung: nor did his courage fail, or vigour
wane, as the shades of night gathered round him. In the latest of all
his poems, he still speaks of

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."

"No, at noon-day in the bustle of man's work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
'Strive and thrive'! cry 'Speed!--fight on, fare ever
There as here.'"[A]

[Footnote A: Epilogue to _Asolande_.]

These are fit words to close such a life. His last act is a kind of
re-enlistment in the service of the good; the joyous venturing forth on
a new war under new conditions and in lands unknown, by a heroic man who
is sure of himself and sure of his cause.

But now comes the great difficulty. How can the poet combine such
earnestness in the moral struggle with so deep a conviction of the
ultimate nothingness of evil, and of the complete victory of the good?
Again and again we have found him pronounce such victory to be
absolutely necessary and inevitable. His belief in God, his trust in His
love and might, will brook no limit anywhere. His conviction is that the
power of the good subjects evil itself to its authority.

"My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst.
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."[B]

[Footnote B: _Apparent Failure_.]

It is the poet himself and not merely the sophistic aesthete of _Fifine_
that speaks:--

"Partake my confidence! No creature's made so mean
But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate,
Its supreme worth: fulfils, by ordinance of fate,
Its momentary task, gets glory all its own,
Tastes triumph in the world, pre-eminent, alone."

*       *       *       *       *

"As firm is my belief, quick sense perceives the same
Self-vindicating flash illustrate every man
And woman of our mass, and prove, throughout the plan,
No detail but, in place allotted it, was prime
And perfect."[A]

[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_, xxix.]

But if so,--if Helen, Fifine, Guido, find themselves within the plan,
fulfilling, after all, the task allotted to them in the universal
scheme, how can we condemn them? Must we not plainly either modify our
optimism and keep our faith in God within bounds, or, on the other hand,
make every failure "apparent" only, sin a phantom, and the distinction
between right and wrong a helpful illusion that stings man to
effort--but an illusion all the same?

"What but the weakness in a Faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible comforts.
How can man love but what he yearns to help?"[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1649-1652.]

Where is the need, nay, the possibility, of self-sacrifice, except where
there is misery? How can good, the good which is highest, find itself,
and give utterance and actuality to the power that slumbers within it,
except as resisting evil? Are not good and evil relative? Is not every
criminal, when really known, working out in his own way the salvation of
himself and the world? Why cannot he, then, take his stand on his right
to move towards the good by any path that best pleases himself: since
move he must. It is easy for the religious conscience to admit with
Pippa that

"All service ranks the same with God--
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last or first."[A]

[Footnote A: _Pippa Passes_.]

But, if so, why do we admire her sweet pre-eminence in moral beauty, and
in what is she really better than Ottima? The doctrine that

"God's in His heaven--
All's right with the world!"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

finds its echo in every devout spirit from the beginning of the world:
it is of the very essence of religion. But what of its moral
consequences? Religion, when thoroughly consistent, is the triumphant
reconciliation of all contradictions. It is optimism, the justification
of things as the process of evolving the good; and its peace and joy are
just the outcome of the conviction, won by faith, that the ideal is
actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined
with divine goodness. But morality is the condemnation of things as they
are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be. The
absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality,
either in something lower or something higher. But the moral ideal, when
reached, turns at once into a stepping-stone, a dead self; and the good
formulates itself anew as an ideal in the future. So that morality is
the sphere of discrepancy, and the moral life a progressive realization
of a good that can never be complete. It would thus seem to be
irreconcilably different from religion, which must, in some way or
other, find the good to be present, actual, absolute, without shadow of
change, or hint of limit or imperfection.

How, then, does the poet deal with the apparently fundamental
discrepancy between religion, which postulates the absolute and
universal supremacy of God, and morality, which postulates the absolute
supremacy of man within the sphere of his own action, in so far as it is
called right or wrong?

This difficulty, in one or other of its forms, is, perhaps, the most
pressing in modern philosophy. It is the problem of the possibility of
rising above the "Either, Or" of discrepant conceptions, to a position
which grasps the alternatives together in a higher idea. It is at bottom
the question, whether we can have a philosophy at all; or whether we
must fall back once more into compromise, and the scepticism and despair
which it always brings with it.

It is just because Browning does not compromise between the contending
truths that he is instructive. The value of his solution of the problem
corresponds accurately to the degree in which he holds both the
absoluteness of God's presence in history, and the complete independence
of the moral consciousness. He refused to degrade either God or man. In
the name of religion, he refuses to say that "a purpose of reason is
visible in the social and legal structures of mankind"--_only_ "on the
whole "; and in the name of morality, he refuses to "assert the
perfection of the actual world" as it is, and by implication to stultify
all human endeavour. He knew the vice of compromising, and strove to
hold both the truths in their fulness.

That he did not compromise God's love or power, and make it dominant
merely "on the whole," leaving within His realm, which is universal, a
limbo for the "lost," is evident to the most casual reader.

"This doctrine, which one healthy view of things,
One sane sight of the general ordinance--
Nature,--and its particular object,--man,--
Which one mere eyecast at the character
Of Who made these and gave man sense to boot,
Had dissipated once and evermore,--
This doctrine I have dosed our flock withal.
Why? Because none believed it."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Inn Album_.]

"O'er-punished wrong grows right," Browning says. Hell is, for him, the
consciousness of opportunities neglected, arrested growth; and even
that, in turn, is the beginning of a better life.

"However near I stand in His regard,
So much the nearer had I stood by steps
Offered the feet which rashly spurned their help.
That I call Hell; why further punishment?"[B]

[Footnote B: _A Camel-Driver._]

Another ordinary view, according to which evil is self-destructive, and
ends with the annihilation of its servant, he does not so decisively
reject. At least, in a passage of wonderful poetic and philosophic
power, which he puts into the mouth of Caponsacchi, he describes Guido
as gradually lapsing towards the chaos, which is lower then created
existence. He observes him

"Not to die so much as slide out of life,
Pushed by the general horror and common hate
Low, lower,--left o' the very ledge of things,
I seem to see him catch convulsively,
One by one at all honest forms of life,
At reason, order, decency and use,
To cramp him and get foothold by at least;
And still they disengage them from _his_ clutch.

*       *       *       *       *

"And thus I see him slowly and surely edged
Off all the table-land whence life upsprings
Aspiring to be immortality."

There he loses him in the loneliness, silence and dusk--

"At the horizontal line, creation's verge.
From what just is to absolute nothingness."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, 1911-1931.]

But the matchless moral insight of the Pope leads to a different
conclusion, and the poet again retrieves his faith. The Pope puts his
first trust "in the suddenness of Guido's fate," and hopes that the
truth may "be flashed out by the blow of death, and Guido see one
instant and be saved." Nor is his trust vain. "The end comes," said Dr.
Westcott. "The ministers of death claim him. In his agony he summons
every helper whom he has known or heard of--

"'Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God--'

"and then the light breaks through the blackest gloom:

"'Pompilia! will you let them murder me?'

"In this supreme moment he has known what love is, and, knowing it, has
begun to feel it. The cry, like the intercession of the rich man in
Hades, is a promise of a far-off deliverance."

But even beyond this hope, which is the last for most men, the Pope had
still another.

"Else I avert my face, nor follow him
Into that sad obscure sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain: _which must not be_."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 2129-2132.]

This phrase, "which must not be," seems to me to carry in it the
irrefragable conviction of the poet himself. The same faith in the
future appears in the words in which Pompilia addresses her priest.

"O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death!
Love will be helpful to me more and more
I' the coming course, the new path I must tread,
My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!"[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Seek--Pompilia_, 1786-1790.]

For the poet, the death of man brings no change in the purpose of God;
nor does it, or aught else, fix a limit to His power, or stultify by
failure the end implied in all God's work, nature no less than man
himself--to wit, that every soul shall learn the lesson of goodness, and
reflect the devine life in desire, intelligence, and will.

Equally emphatic, on some sides at least, is Browning's rejection of
those compromises, with which the one-sided religious consciousness
threatens the existence of the moral life. At times, indeed, he seems to
teach, as man's best and highest, a passive acquiescence in the divine
benevolence; and he uses the dangerous metaphor of the clay and potter's
wheel. _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ bids us feel

"Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay";

and his prayer is,

"So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Rabbi Ben Ezra_.]

But this attitude of quiescent trust, which is so characteristic of
religion, is known by the poet to be only a phase of man's best life. It
is a temporary resting-place for the pilgrim: "the country of Beulah,
whose air is very sweet and pleasant, where he may solace himself for a
season." But, "the way lies directly through it," and the pilgrim,
"being a little strengthened and better able to bear his sickness," has
to go forward on his journey. Browning's characteristic doctrine on this
matter is not acquiescence and resignation. "Leave God the way" has, in
his view, its counterpart and condition--"Have you the will!"

"For a worm must turn
If it would have its wrong observed by God."[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book--Pompilia,_ 1592-1593.]

The root of Browning's joy is in the need of progress towards an
infinitely high goal. He rejoices

"that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul's wings never furled."

The bliss of endeavour, the infinite worth of the consciousness of
failure, with its evidence of coming triumph, "the spark which disturbs
our clod," these are the essence of his optimistic interpretation of
human life, and also of his robust ethical doctrine.

"Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Rabbi Ben Ezra._]

And he prolongs the battle beyond time, for the battle is the moral life
and man's best, and therefore God's best in man. The struggle upward
from the brute, may, indeed end with death. But this only means that man
"has learned the uses of the flesh," and there are in him other
potencies to evolve:

"Other heights in other lives, God willing."

Death is the summing up of this life's meaning, stored strength for new
adventure.

"The future I may face now I have proved the past;" and, in view of it,
Browning is

"Fearless and unperplexed
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to indue."

He is sure that it will be a battle, and a winning one. There is no
limiting here of man's possibility, or confining of man's endeavour
after goodness.

"Strive and Thrive! cry 'Speed,' fight on, fare ever
There as here,"

are the last words which came from his pen.

Now, it may fairly be argued that these allusions to what death may
mean, and what may lie beyond death, valuable as they may be as poetry,
cannot help in philosophy. They do not solve the problem of the relation
between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism
between them into a life beyond, of which we have no experience. If the
problem is to be solved, it must be solved as it is stated for us in the
present world.

This objection is valid, so far as it goes. But Browning's treatment is
valuable all the same, in so far as it indicates his unwillingness to
limit or compromise the conflicting truths. He, by implication, rejects
the view, ordinarily held without being examined, that the moral life is
preliminary to the joy and rest of religion; a brief struggle, to be
followed by a sudden lift out of it into some serene sphere, where man
will lead an angel's life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no
growth. He refuses to make morality an accident in man's history and "to
put man in the place of God," by identifying the process with the ideal;
he also refuses to make man's struggle, and God's achievement within
man, mutually exclusive alternatives. As I shall show in the sequel,
movement towards an ideal, actualizing but never actualized, is for the
poet the very nature of man. And to speak about either God or man (or
even the absolute philosopher) as "the last term of a development" has
no meaning to him. We are not first moral and then religious, first
struggling with evil and then conscious of overcoming it. God is with us
in the battle, and the victory is in every blow.

But there lies a deeper difficulty than this in the way of reconciling
morality and religion, or the presence of both God and man in human
action. Morality, in so far as it is achievement, might conceivably be
immediately identified with the process of an absolute good; but
morality is always a consciousness of failure as well. Its very essence
and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual. And the higher
a man's spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the
evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done.
"Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold
I say unto you, 'Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are
white already to harvest.'" It looks like blasphemy against morality to
say "that God lives in eternity and has, therefore, plenty of time."
Morality destroys one's contentment with the world; and its language
seems to be, "God is not here, but there; the kingdom is still to come."

Nor does it rest with condemning the world. It also finds flaws in its
own highest achievement; so that we seem ever "To mock ourselves in all
that's best of us." The beginning of the spiritual life seems just to
consist in a consciousness of complete failure, and that consciousness
ever grows deeper.

This is well illustrated in Browning's account of Caponsacchi; from the
time when Pompilia's smile first "glowed" upon him, and set him--

"Thinking how my life
Had shaken under me--broken short indeed
And showed the gap 'twixt what is, what should be--
And into what abysm the soul may slip"--[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book_--_Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, 485-488.]

up to the time when his pure love for her revealed to him something of
the grandeur of goodness, and led him to define his ideal and also to
express his despair.

"To have to do with nothing but the true,
The good, the eternal--and these, not alone
In the main current of the general life,
But small experiences of every day,
Concerns of the particular hearth and home:
To learn not only by a comet's rush
But a rose's birth--not by the grandeur, God,
But the comfort, Christ. _All this_ how _far away_
Mere delectation, meet for a minute's dream!"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid._ 2089-2097.]

So illimitably beyond his strength is such a life, that he finds himself
like the drudging student who

"Trims his lamp,
Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place
Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close,
Dreams, 'Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!'--
Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes
To the old solitary nothingness."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book_--_Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, 2098-2103.]

The moral world with its illimitable horizon had Opened out around him,
the voice of the new commandment bidding him "be perfect as his Father
in heaven is perfect" had destroyed his peace, and made imperative a
well nigh hopeless struggle; and, as he compares himself at his best
with the new ideal, he breaks out into the cry,

"O great, just, good God! Miserable Me!"

This humility and contrition, this discontent verging on hopelessness,
constituted, as we have seen, the characteristic attitude of Carlyle;
and it represents a true and, in fact, an indispensable element of man's
moral life.

But this self-condemnation in the face of the moral law is nothing more
than an element, and must not be taken either for the whole truth or for
the most fundamental one. It is because it is taken as fundamental and
final that the discrepancy between morality and religion is held to be
absolute, and the consciousness of evil is turned against faith in the
Good. It is an abstract way of thinking that makes us deduce, from the
transcendent height of the moral ideal, the impossibility of attaining
goodness, and the failure of God's purpose in man. And this is what
Carlyle did. He stopped short at the consciousness of imperfection, and
he made no attempt to account for it. He took it as a complete fact, and
therefore drew a sharp line of distinction between the human and the
divine. And, so far, he was right; for, if we look no further than this
negative side, it is emphatically absurd to identify man, be he
"philosopher" or not, with the Absolute. "Why callest thou Me good?
there is none good save One, that is God." The "ought" _must_ stand
above _all_ human attainment, and declare that "whatever is, is wrong."
But whence comes the ought itself, the ideal which condemns us? Is it
not also immanent in the fact it condemns?

"Who is not acute enough," asks Hegel, "to see a great deal in his
surroundings which is really far from being what it ought to be?" And
who also, we may add, has not enough of the generalizing faculty, often
mistaken for a philosophical one, to extend this condemnation over the
whole of "this best of all possible worlds"? But what is this
"ought-to-be," which has such potency in it that all things confronted
with it lose their worth?

The first answer is, that it is an idea which men, and particularly good
men, carry with them. But a little consideration will show that it
cannot be a mere idea. It must be something more valid than a capricious
product of the individual imagination. For we cannot wisely condemn
things because they do not happen to answer to any casual conception
which we may choose to elevate into a criterion. A criterion must have
objective validity. It must be an idea _of_ something and not an empty