"For many a thrill
Of kinship, I confess to, with the powers
Called Nature: animate, inanimate,
In parts or in the whole, there's something there
Man-like that somehow meets the man in me."[D]

[Footnote D: _Ibid_.]

These passages make it clear that the poet recognized that the idea of
development "levels up," and that he makes an intelligent, and not a
perverted and abstract use of this instrument of thought. He sees each
higher stage carrying within it the lower, the present storing up the
past; he recognizes that the process is a self-enriching one. He knows
it to be no degradation of the higher that it has been in the lower; for
he distinguishes between that life, which is continuous amidst the
fleeting forms, and the temporary tenements, which it makes use of
during the process of ascending.

"From first to last of lodging, I was I,
And not at all the place that harboured me."[A]

[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]

When nature is thus looked upon from the point of view of its final
attainment, in the light of the self-consciousness into which it
ultimately breaks, a new dignity is added to every preceding phase. The
lowest ceases to be lowest, except in the sense that its promise is not
fulfilled and its potency not actualized; for, throughout the whole
process, the activity streams from the highest. It is that which is
about to be which guides the growing thing and gives it unity. The final
cause is the efficient cause; the distant purpose is the ever-present
energy; the last is always first.

Nor does the poet shrink from calling this highest, this last which is
also first, by its highest name,--God.

"He dwells in all,
From, life's minute beginnings, up at last
To man--the consummation of this scheme
Of being, the completion of this sphere
Of life."[A]

[Footnote A: _Paracelsus_.]

"All tended to mankind," he said, after reviewing the whole process of
nature in _Paracelsus_,

"And, man produced, all has its end thus far:
But in completed man begins anew
A tendency to God."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

There is nowhere a break in the continuity. God is at the beginning, His
rapturous presence is seen in all the processes of nature, His power and
knowledge and love work in the mind of man, and all history is His
revelation of Himself.

The gap which yawns for ordinary thought between animate and inanimate,
between nature and spirit, between man and God, does not baffle the
poet. At the stage of human life, which is "the grand result" of
nature's blind process,

"A supplementary reflux of light,
Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains
Each back step in the circle."[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

Nature is retracted into thought, built again in mind.

"Man, once descried, imprints for ever
His presence on all lifeless things."[D]

[Footnote D: _Ibid_.]

The self-consciousness of man is the point where "all the scattered rays
meet"; and "the dim fragments," the otherwise meaningless manifold, the
dispersed activities of nature, are lifted into a kosmos by the activity
of intelligence. In its light, the forces of nature are found to be, not
blind nor purposeless, but "hints and previsions"

"Strewn confusedly everywhere about
The inferior natures, and all lead up higher,
All shape out dimly the superior race,
The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false,
And man appears at last."[A]

[Footnote A: _Paracelsus_.]

In this way, and in strict accordance with the principle of evolution,
the poet turns back at each higher stage to re-illumine in a broader
light what went before,--just as we know the seedling after it is grown;
just as, with every advance in life, we interpret the past anew, and
turn the mixed ore of action into pure metal by the reflection which
draws the false from the true.

"Youth ended, I shall try
My gain or loss thereby;
Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold:
And I shall weigh the same,
Give life its praise or blame:
Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old."[B]

[Footnote B: _Rabbi Ben Ezra_.]

As youth attains its meaning in age, so does the unconscious process of
nature come to its meaning in man And old age,

"Still within this life
Though lifted o'er its strife,"

is able to

"Discern, compare, pronounce at last,
This rage was right i' the main,
That acquiescence vain";[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

so man is able to penetrate beneath the apparently chaotic play of
phenomena, and find in them law, and beauty, and goodness. The laws
which he finds by thought are not his inventions, but his discoveries.
The harmonies are in the organ, if the artist only knows how to elicit
them. Nay, the connection is still more intimate. It is in the thought
of man that silent nature finds its voice; it blooms into "meaning,"
significance, thought, in him, as the plant shows its beauty in the
flower. Nature is making towards humanity, and in humanity it finds
_itself_.

"Striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form."[A]

[Footnote A: _Emerson_.]

The geologist, physicist, chemist, by discovering the laws of nature, do
not bind unconnected phenomena; but they refute the hasty conclusion of
sensuous thought, that the phenomena ever were unconnected. Men of
science do not introduce order into chance and chaos, but show that
there never was chance or chaos. The poet does not make the world
beautiful, but finds the beauty that is dwelling there. Without him,
indeed, the beauty would not be, any more than the life of the tree is
beautiful until it has evolved its potencies into the outward form.
Nevertheless, he is the expression of what was before, and the beauty
was there in potency, awaiting its expression. "Only let his thoughts be
of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture," said Emerson.

"The winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh,
Never a senseless gust now man is born.
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts,
A secret they assemble to discuss
When the sun drops behind their trunks.

*       *       *       *       *

"The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour,
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face."[A]

[Footnote A: _Paracelsus_.]

Such is the transmuting power of imagination, that there is "nothing but
doth suffer change into something rich and strange"; and yet the
imagination, when loyal to itself, only sees more deeply into the truth
of things, and gets a closer and fuller hold of facts.

But, although the human mind thus heals the breach between nature and
spirit, and discovers the latter in the former, still it is not in this
way that Browning finally establishes his idealism. For him, the
principle working in all things is not reason, but love. It is from love
that all being first flowed; into it all returns through man; and in all
"the wide compass which is fetched," through the infinite variety of
forms of being, love is the permanent element and the true essence.
Nature is on its way back to God, gathering treasure as it goes. The
static view is not true to facts; it is development that for the poet
explains the nature of things; and development is the evolution of love.
Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is
our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything
better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the
return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.

Now, whether love is the highest principle or not, I shall not inquire
at present. My task in this chapter has been to try to show that the
idea of evolution drives us onward towards some highest conception, and
then uses that conception as a principle to explain all things. If man
is veritably higher as a physical organism than the bird or reptile,
then biology, if it proceeds according to the principles of evolution,
_must_ seek the meaning of the latter in the former, and make the whole
kingdom of life a process towards man. "Man is no upstart in the
creation. His limbs are only a more exquisite organization--say rather
the finish--of the rudimental forms that have already been sweeping the
sea and creeping in the mud." And the same way of thought applies to man
as a spiritual agent. If spirit be higher than matter, and if love be
spirit at its best, then the principle of evolution leaves no option to
the scientific thinker, but to regard all things as potentially spirit,
and all the phenomena of the world as manifestations of love. Evolution
necessarily combines all the objects to which it is applied into a
unity. It knits all the infinite forms of natural life into an organism
of organisms, so that it is a universal life which really lives in all
animate beings. "Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next
inferior and predicts the next higher. There is one animal, one plant,
one matter, and one force." In its still wider application by poetry and
philosophy, the idea of evolution gathers all being into one
self-centred totality, and makes all finite existence a movement within,
and a movement of, that final perfection which, although last in order
of time, is first in order of potency,--the _prius_ of all things, the
active energy _in_ all things, and the _reality_ of all things. It is
the doctrine of the immanence of God; and it reveals "the effort of God,
of the supreme intellect, in the extreme frontier of His universe."

In pronouncing, as Browning frequently does, that "after last comes
first" and "what God once blessed cannot prove accursed"; in the
boldness of the faith whereby he makes all the inferior grades of being
into embodiments of the supreme good; in resolving the evils of human
life, the sorrow, strife, and sin of man into means of man's promotion,
he is only applying, in a thorough manner, the principle on which all
modern speculation rests. His conclusions may shock common-sense; and
they may seem to stultify not only our observation of facts, but the
testimony of our moral consciousness. But I do not know of any principle
of speculation which, when elevated into a universal principle of
thought, will not do the same; and this is why the greatest poets and
philosophers seem to be touched with a divine madness. Still, if this be
madness, there is a method in it. We cannot escape from its logic,
except by denying the idea of evolution--the hypothesis by means of
which modern thought aims, and in the main successfully aims, at
reducing the variety of existence, and the chaos of ordinary experience,
into an order-ruled world and a kosmos of articulated knowledge.

The new idea of evolution differs from that of universal causation, to
which even the ignorance of our own day has learnt to submit, in this
mainly--it does not leave things on the level on which it finds them.
Both cause and evolution assert the unity of being, which, indeed, every
one must assume--even sceptics and pessimists; but development
represents that unity as self-enriching; so that its true nature is
revealed, only in the highest form of existence which man can conceive.
The attempt of poets and philosophers to establish a universal synthesis
by means of evolution, differs from the work which is done by men of
science, only in the extent of its range and the breadth of its results.
It is not "idealism," but the scepticism which, in our day, conceals its
real nature under the name of dualism or agnosticism, that is at war
with the inner spirit of science. "Not only," we may say of Browning as
it was said of Emerson by Professor Tyndall, "is his religious sense
entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science; but all such
discoveries he comprehends and assimilates. By him scientific
conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer
hues of an ideal world." And this he does without any distortion of the
truth. For natural science, to one who understands its main tendency,
does not militate against philosophy, art, and religion; nor threaten to
overturn a metaphysic whose principle is truth, or beauty, or goodness.
Rather, it is gradually eliminating the discord of fragmentary
existence, and making the harmony of the world more and more audible to
mankind. It is progressively proving that the unity, of which we are all
obscurely conscious from the first, actually holds in the whole region
of its survey. The idea of evolution is reconciling science with art and
religion, in an idealistic conception of the universe.




CHAPTER VIII.

BROWNING'S SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.


"Let him, therefore, who would arrive at knowledge of
nature, train his moral sense, let him act and conceive in
accordance with the noble essence of his soul; and, as if
of herself, nature will become open to him. Moral action
is that great and only experiment, in which all riddles of
the most manifold appearances explain themselves."[A]

[Footnote A: _Novalis_.]

In the last chapter, I tried to set forth some considerations that
justify the attempt to interpret the world by a spiritual principle. The
conception of development, which modern science and philosophy assume as
a starting-point for their investigation, was shown to imply that the
lowest forms of existence can be explained, only as stages in the
self-realization of that which is highest. This idea "levels upwards,"
and points to self-consciousness as the ultimate truth of all things. In
other words, it involves that all interpretation of the world is
anthropomorphic, in the sense that what constitutes thought constitutes
things, and, therefore, that the key to nature is man.

In propounding this theory of love, and establishing an idealism,
Browning is in agreement with the latest achievement of modern thought.
For, if the principle of evolution be granted, love is a far more
adequate hypothesis for the explanation of the nature of things, than
any purely physical principle. Nay, science itself, in so far as it
presupposes evolution, tends towards an idealism of this type. Whether
love be the best expression for that highest principle, which is
conceived as the truth of being, and whether Browning's treatment of it
is consistent and valid, I do not as yet inquire. Before attempting that
task, it must be seen to what extent, and in what way, he applies the
hypothesis of universal love to the particular facts of life. For the
present, I take it as admitted that the hypothesis is legitimate, as an
hypothesis; it remains to ask, with what success, if any, we may hope,
by its means, to solve the contradictions of life, and to gather its
conflicting phenomena into the unity of an intelligible system. This
task cannot be accomplished within our limits, except in a very partial
manner. I can attempt to meet only a few of the more evident and
pressing difficulties that present themselves, and I can do that only in
a very general way.

The first of these difficulties, or, rather, the main difficulty from
which all others spring, is that the hypothesis of universal love is
incompatible with the existence of any kind of evil, whether natural or
moral. Of this, Browning was well aware. He knew that he had brought
upon himself the hard task of showing that pain, weakness, ignorance,
failure, doubt, death, misery, and vice, in all their complex forms, can
find their legitimate place in a scheme of love. And there is nothing
more admirable in his attitude, or more inspiring in his teaching, than
the manly frankness with which he endeavours to confront the manifold
miseries of human life, and to constrain them to yield, as their
ultimate meaning and reality, some spark of good.

But, as we have seen, there is a portion of this task in the discharge
of which Browning is drawn beyond the strict limits of art. Neither the
magnificent boldness of his religious faith, nor the penetration of his
artistic insight, although they enabled him to deal successfully with
the worst samples of human evil, as in _The Ring and the Book_, could
dissipate the gloom which reflection gathers around the general problem.
Art cannot answer the questions of philosophy. The difficulties that
critical reason raises reason alone can lay. Nevertheless, the poet was
forced by his reflective impulse, to meet that problem in the form in
which it presents itself in the region of metaphysics. He was conscious
of the presuppositions within which his art worked, and he sought to
justify them. Into this region we must now follow him, so as to examine
his theory of life, not merely as it is implied in the concrete
creations of his art, but as it is expressed in those later poems, in
which he attempts to deal directly with the speculative difficulties
that crowd around the conception of evil.

To the critic of a philosophy, there is hardly more than one task of
supreme importance. It is that of determining the precise point from
which the theory he examines takes its departure; for, when the central
conception is clearly grasped, it will be generally found that it rules
all the rest. The superstructure of philosophic edifices is usually put
together in a sufficiently solid manner--it is the foundation that gives
way. Hence Hegel, who, whatever may be thought of his own theory, was
certainly the most profound critic of philosophy since Aristotle,
generally concentrates his attack on the preliminary hypothesis. He
brings down the erroneous system by removing its foundation-stone. His
criticism of Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling may almost be said to
be gathered into a single sentence.

Browning has made no secret of his central conception. It is the idea of
an immanent or "immundate" love. And that love, we have shown, is
conceived by him as the supreme moral motive, the ultimate essence and
end of all self-conscious activity, the veritable nature of both man and
God.

"Denn das Leben ist die Liebe,
Und des Lebens Leben Geist."

His philosophy of human life rests on the idea that it is the
realization of a moral purpose, which is a loving purpose. To him there
is no supreme good, except good character; and the foundation of that
character by man and in man is the ultimate purpose, and, therefore, the
true meaning of all existence.

"I search but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own
For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life. Death reads the title clear--
What each soul for itself conquered from out things here:
Since, in the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert."[A]

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

In this passage, Browning gives expression to an idea which continually
reappears in his pages--that human life, in its essence, is movement to
moral goodness through opposition. His fundamental conception of the
human spirit is that it is a process, and not a fixed fact. "Man," he
says, "was made to grow not stop."

"Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self."[B]

[Footnote B: _A Death in the Desert_.]

"By such confession straight he falls
Into man's place, a thing nor God nor beast,
Made to know that he can know and not more:
Lower than God who knows all and can all,
Higher than beasts which know and can so far
As each beast's limit, perfect to an end,
Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more;
While man knows partly but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid he may grasp and use,
Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's and not the beasts': God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be."[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

It were easy to multiply passages which show that his ultimate
deliverance regarding man is, not that he is, nor that he is not, but
that he is ever becoming. Man is ever at the point of contradiction
between the actual and ideal, and moving from the latter to the former.
Strife constitutes him. He is a war of elements; "hurled from change to
change unceasingly." But rest is death; for it is the cessation of the
spiritual activity, whose essence is acquirement, not mere possession,
whether in knowledge or in goodness.

"Man must pass from old to new,
From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
From what once seemed good, to what now proves best."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]

Were the movement to stop, and the contradiction between the actual and
ideal reconciled, man would leave man's estate, and pass under "angel's
law."

"Indulging every instinct of the soul
There, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

But as long as he is man, he has

"Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become."

In _Paracelsus_, _Fifine at the Fair_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_,
and many of his other poems, Browning deals with the problem of human
life from the point of view of development. And it is this point of
view, consistently held, which enables him to throw a new light on the
whole subject of ethics. For, if man be veritably a being in process of
evolution, if he be a permanent that always changes from earliest
childhood to old age, if he be a living thing, a potency in process of
actualization, then no fixed distinctions made with reference to him can
be true. If, for instance, it be asked whether man is rational or
irrational, free or bound, good or evil, God or brute, the true answer,
if he is veritably a being moving from ignorance to knowledge, from
wickedness to virtue, from bondage to freedom, is, that he is at once
neither of these alternatives and both. All hard terms of division, when
applied to a subject which grows, are untrue. If the life of man is a
self-enriching process, if he is _becoming_ good, and rational, and
free, then at no point in the movement is it possible to pass fixed and
definite judgments upon him. He must be estimated by his direction and
momentum, by the whence and whither of his life. There is a sense in
which man is from the first and always good, rational and free; for it
is only by the exercise of reason and freedom that he exists as man. But
there is also a sense in which he is none of these; for he is at the
first only a potency not yet actualized. He is not rational, but
becoming rational; not good, but becoming good; not free, but aspiring
towards freedom. It is his prayer that "in His light, he may see light
truly, and in His service find perfect freedom."

In this frank assumption of the point of view of development. Browning
suggests the question whether the endless debate regarding freedom, and
necessity, and other moral terms, may not spring from the fact, that
both of the opposing schools of ethics are fundamentally unfaithful to
the subject of their inquiry. They are treating a developing reality
from an abstract point of view, and taking for granted,--what cannot be
true of man, if he grows in intellectual power and moral goodness--that
he is _either_ good or evil, _either_ rational or irrational, _either_
free or bond, at every moment in the process. They are treating man from
a static, instead of from a kinetic point of view, and forgetting that
it is his business to acquire the moral and intellectual freedom, which
he has potentially from the first--

"Some fitter way express
Heart's satisfaction that the Past indeed
Is past, gives way before Life's best and last,
The all-including Future!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Gerard de Lairesse_.]

But, whether or not the new point of view renders some of the old
disputations of ethics meaningless, it is certain that Browning viewed
moral life as a growth through conflict.

"What were life
Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife
Through the ambiguous Present to the goal
Of some all-reconciling Future?"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

To become, to develop, to actualize by reaction against the natural and
moral environment, is the meaning both of the self and of the world it
works upon. "We are here to learn the good of peace through strife, of
love through hate, and reach knowledge by ignorance."

Now, since the conception of development is a self-contradictory one,
or, in other words, since it necessarily implies the conflict of the
ideal and actual in all life, and in every instant of its history, it
remains for us to determine more fully what are the warring elements in
human nature. What is the nature of this life of man, which, like all
life, is self-evolving; and by conflict with what does the evolution
take place? What is the ideal which condemns the actual, and yet
realizes itself by means of it; and what is the actual which wars
against the ideal, and yet contains it in potency, and reaches towards
it? That human life is conceived by Browning as a moral life, and not a
more refined and complex form of the natural life of plants and
animals--a view which finds its exponents in Herbert Spencer, and other
so-called evolutionists--it is scarcely necessary to assert. It is a
life which determines itself, and determines itself according to an idea
of goodness. That idea, moreover, because it is a _moral ideal_, must be
regarded as the conception of perfect and absolute goodness. Through the
moral end, man is ideally identified with God, who, indeed, is
necessarily conceived as man's moral ideal regarded as already and
eternally real. "God" and the "moral ideal" are, in truth, expressions
of the same idea; they convey the conception of perfect goodness from
different standpoints. And perfect goodness is, to Browning, limitless
love. Pleasure, wisdom, power, and even the beauty which art discovers
and reveals, together with every other inner quality and outer state of
being, have only relative worth. "There is nothing either in the world
or out of it which is unconditionally good, except a good will," said
Kant; and a good will, according to Browning, is a will that wills
lovingly. From love all other goodness is derived. There is earnest
meaning, and not mere sentiment, in the poet's assertion that

"There is no good of life but love--but love!
What else looks good, is some shade flung from love.
Love gilds it, gives it worth. Be warned by me,
Never you cheat yourself one instant! Love,
Give love, ask only love, and leave the rest!"[A]

[Footnote A: _In a Balcony_.]

"Let man's life be true," he adds, "and love's the truth of mine." To
attain this truth, that is, to constitute love into the inmost law of
his being, and permanent source of all his activities, is the task of
man. And Browning defines that love as

"Yearning to dispense,
Each one its own amount of gain thro' its own mode
Of practising with life."

There is no need of illustrating further the doctrine, so evident in
Browning, that "love" is the ideal which in man's life makes through
conflict for its own fulfilment. From what has been already said, it is
abundantly plain that love is to him a divine element, which is at war
with all that is lower in man and around him, and which by reaction
against circumstance converts its own mere promise into fruition and
fact. Through love man's nature reaches down to the permanent essence,
amid the fleeting phenomena of the world, and is at one with what is
first and last. As loving he ranks with God. No words are too strong to
represent the intimacy of the relation. For, however limited in range
and tainted with alien qualities human love may be, it is still "a
pin-point rock of His boundless continent." It is not a semblance of the
divine nature, an analogon, or verisimilitude, but the love of God
himself in man: so that man is in this sense an incarnation of the
divine. The Godhood in him constitutes him, so that he cannot become
himself, or attain his own ideal or true nature, except by becoming
perfect as God is perfect.

But the emphasis thus laid on the divine worth and dignity of human love
is balanced by the stress which the poet places on the frailty and
finitude of every other human attribute. Having elevated the ideal, he
degrades the actual. Knowledge and the intellectual energy which
produces it; art and the love of beauty from which it springs: every
power and every gift, physical and spiritual, other than love, has in it
the fatal flaw of being merely human. All these are so tainted with
creatureship, so limited and conditioned, that it is hardly too much to
say that they are, at their best, deceptive endowments. Thus, the life
of man regarded as a whole is, in its last essence, a combination of
utterly disparate elements. The distinction of the old moralists between
divinity and dust; the absolute dualism of the old ascetics between
flesh and spirit, sense and reason, find their accurate parallel in
Browning's teachings. But he is himself no ascetic, and the line of
distinction he draws does not, like theirs, pass between the flesh and
the spirit. It rather cleaves man's spiritual nature into two portions,
which are absolutely different from each other. A chasm divides the head
from the heart, the intellect from the emotions, the moral and practical
from the perceptive and reflective faculties. And it is this absolute
cleavage that gives to Browning's teaching, both on ethics and religion,
one of its most peculiar characteristics. By keeping it constantly in
sight, we may hope to render intelligible to ourselves the solution he
offers of the problem of evil, and of other fundamental difficulties of
the life of man. For, while Browning's optimism has its original source
in his conception of the unity of God and man, through the Godlike
quality of love--even "the poorest love that was ever offered"--he finds
himself unable to maintain it, except at the expense of degrading man's
knowledge. Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon
ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of
a Spinozist, on God's communication of His own substance to man; on the
side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray
expressions which break through his deliberate theory. While "love gains
God at first leap,"

"Knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Pillar at Sebzevar_.]

A radical flaw runs through our knowing faculty. Human knowledge is not
only incomplete--no one can be so foolish as to deny that--but it is, as
regarded by Browning, essentially inadequate to the nature of fact, and
we must "distrust it, even when it seems demonstrable." No professed
agnostic can condemn the human intellect more utterly than he does. He
pushes the limitedness of human knowledge into a disqualification of it
to reach truth at all; and makes the conditions according to which we
know, or seem to know, into a deceiving necessity, which makes us know
wrongly.

"To know of, think about,--
Is all man's sum of faculty effects
When exercised on earth's least atom, Son!
What was, what is, what may such atom be?
No answer!"[B]

[Footnote B: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

Thought plays around facts, but never reaches them. Mind intervenes
between itself and its objects, and throws its own shadow upon them; nor
can it penetrate through that shadow, but deals with it as if it were
reality, though it knows all the time that it is not.

This theory of knowledge, or rather of nescience or no-knowledge, he
gives in _La Saisiaz_, _Ferishtah's Fancies, The Parleyings_, and
_Asolando_--in all his later and more reflective poems, in fact. It
must, I think, be held to be his deliberate and final view--and all the
more so, because, by a peculiar process, he gets from it his defence of
his ethical and religious faith.

In the first of these poems, Browning, while discussing the problem of
immortality in a purely speculative spirit, and without stipulating,
"Provided answer suits my hopes, not fears," gives a tolerably full
account of that which must be regarded as the principles of his theory
of knowledge. Its importance to his ethical doctrine justifies a
somewhat exhaustive examination of it.

He finds himself to be "a midway point, between a cause before and an
effect behind--both blanks." Within that narrow space, of the self
hemmed in by two unknowns, all experience is crammed. Out of that
experience crowds all that he knows, and all that he misknows. There
issues from experience--

"Conjecture manifold,
But, as knowledge, this comes only--things may be as I behold,
Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are;
I myself am what I know not--ignorance which proves no bar
To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can recognize
What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest--surmise.
If my fellows are or are not, what may please them and what pain,--
Mere surmise: my own experience--that is knowledge once again."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

Experience, then, within which he (and every one else) acknowledges that
all his knowledge is confined, yields him as certain facts--the
consciousness that he is, but not what he is: the consciousness that he
is pleased or pained by things about him, whose real nature is entirely
hidden from him: and, as he tells us just before, the assurance that God
is the thing the self perceives outside itself,

"A force
Actual e'er its own beginning, operative thro' its course,
Unaffected by its end."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

But, even this knowledge, limited as it is to the bare existence of
unknown entities, has the further defect of being merely subjective. The
"experience" from which he draws his conclusions, is his own in an
exclusive sense. His "thinking thing" has, apparently, no elements in
common with the "thinking things" of other selves. He ignores the fact
that there may be general laws of thought, according to which his mind
must act in order to be a mind. Intelligence seems to have no nature,
and may be anything. All questions regarding "those apparent other
mortals" are consequently unanswerable to the poet. "Knowledge stands on
my experience"; and this "my" is totally unrelated to all other Mes.

"All outside its narrow hem,
Free surmise may sport and welcome! Pleasures, pains affect mankind
Just as they affect myself? Why, here's my neighbour colour-blind,
Eyes like mine to all appearance: 'green as grass' do I affirm?
'Red as grass' he contradicts me: which employs the proper term?"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

If there were only they two on earth as tenants, there would be no way
of deciding between them; for, according to his argument, the truth is
apparently decided by majority of opinions. Each individual, equipped
with his own particular kind of senses and reason, gets his own
particular experience, and draws his own particular conclusions from it.
If it be asked whether these conclusions are true or not, the only
answer is that the question is absurd; for, under such conditions, there
cannot be either truth or error. Every one's opinion is its own
criterion. Each man is the measure of all things; "His own world for
every mortal," as the poet puts it.