And, indeed, a better explanation is sought, and sought not only by idealists, but by scientific men themselves,—did they only comprehend their own main tendency and method. The impulse towards unity, which is the very essence of thought, if it is baulked in one direction by a hopeless dualism, just breaks out in another. Subjective idealism, that is, the theory that things are nothing but phenomena of the individual's consciousness, that the world is really all inside the philosopher, is now known by most people to end in self-contradiction; and materialism is also known to begin with it. And there are not many people sanguine enough to believe with Mr. Huxley and Mr. Herbert Spencer, that, if we add two self-contradictory theories together, or hold them alternately, we shall find the truth. Modern science, that is, the science which does not philosophize, and modern philosophy are with tolerable unanimity denying this absolute dualism. They do not know of any thought that is not of things, or of any things that are not for thought. It is necessarily assumed that, in some way or other, the gap between things and thought is got over by knowledge. How the connection is brought about may not be known; but, that there is the connection between real things and true thoughts, no one can well deny. It is an ill-starred perversity which leads men to deny such a connection, merely because they have not found out how it is established.

A new category of thought has taken possession of the thought of our time—a category which is fatal to dualism. The idea of development is breaking down the division between mind and matter, as it is breaking down all other absolute divisions. Geology, astronomy, and physics at one extreme, biology, psychology, and philosophy at the other, combine in asserting the idea of the universe as a unity which is always evolving its content, and bringing its secret potencies to the light. It is true that these sciences have not linked hands as yet. We cannot get from chemistry to biology without a leap, or from physiology to psychology without another. But no one will postulate a rift right through being. The whole tendency of modern science implies the opposite of such a conception. History is striving to trace continuity between the civilized man and the savage. Psychology is making towards a junction with physiology and general biology, biology with chemistry, and chemistry with physics. That there is an unbroken continuity in existence is becoming a postulate of modern science, almost as truly as the "universality of law" or "the uniformity of nature." Nor is the postulate held less firmly because the evidence for the continuity of nature is not yet complete. Chemistry has not yet quite lapsed into physics; biology at present shows no sign of giving up its characteristic conception of life, and the former science is as yet quite unable to deal with that peculiar phenomenon. The facts of consciousness have not been resolved into nervous action, and, so far, mind has not been shown to be a secretion of brain. Nevertheless, all these sciences are beating against the limits which separate them, and new suggestions of connection between natural life and its inorganic environment are continually discovered. The sciences are boring towards each other, and the dividing strata are wearing thin; so that it seems reasonable to expect that, with the growth of knowledge, an unbroken way upwards may be discovered, from the lowest and simplest stages of existence to the highest and most complex forms of self-conscious life.

Now, to those persons who are primarily interested in the ethical and religious phenomena of man's life, the idea of abolishing the chasm between spirit and nature is viewed with no little apprehension. It is supposed that if evolution were established as a universal law, and the unity of being were proved, the mental and moral life of man would be degraded into a complex manifestation of mere physical force. And we even find religious men rejoicing at the failure of science to bridge the gap between the inorganic and the organic, and between natural and self-conscious life; as if the validity of religion depended upon the maintenance of their separating boundaries. But no religion that is free from superstitious elements has anything to gain from the failure of knowledge to relate things to each other. It is difficult to see how breaks in the continuity of being can be established, when every living plant confutes the absolute difference between the organic and inorganic, and, by the very fact of living, turns the latter into the former; and it is difficult to deny the continuity of "mind and matter," when every human being is relating himself to the outer world in all his thoughts and actions. And religion is the very last form of thought which could profit from such a proof of absolute distinctions, were it possible. In fact, as we have seen, religion, in so far as it demands a perfect and absolute being as the object of worship, is vitally concerned in maintaining the unity of the world. It must assume that matter, in its degree, reveals the same principle which, in a higher form, manifests itself in spirit.

But closer investigation will show that the real ground for such apprehension does not lie in the continuity of existence, which evolution implies; for religion itself postulates the same thing. The apprehension springs, rather, from the idea that the continuity asserted by evolution, is obtained by resolving the higher forms of existence into the lower. It is believed that, if the application of development to facts were successfully carried out, the organic would be shown to be nothing but complex inorganic forces, mental life nothing but a physiological process, and religion, morality, and art, nothing but products of the highly complex motion of highly complex aggregates of physical atoms.

It seems to me quite natural that science should be regarded as tending towards such a materialistic conclusion. This is the view which many scientific investigators have themselves taken of their work; and some of their philosophical exponents, notably Mr. Herbert Spencer, have, with more or less inconsistency, interpreted the idea of evolution in this manner. But, it may be well to bear in mind that science is generally far more successful in employing its constructive ideas, than it is in rendering an account of them. In fact, it is not its business to examine its categories: that task properly belongs to philosophy, and it is not a superfluous one. But, so long as the employment of the categories in the special province of a particular science yields valid results, scientific explorers and those who attach, and rightly attach, so much value to their discoveries, are very unwilling to believe that these categories are not valid universally. The warning voice of philosophy is not heeded, when it charges natural science with applying its conceptions to materials to which they are inadequate; and its examination of the categories of thought is regarded as an innocent, but also a useless, activity. For, it is argued, what good can arise from the analysis of our working ideas? The world looked for causes, and found them, when it was very young; but, up to the time of David Hume, no one had shown what causality meant, and the explanation which he offered is now rejected by modern science, as definitely as it is rejected by philosophy. Meantime, while philosophy is still engaged in exposing the fallacies of the theory of association as held by Hume, science has gone beyond this category altogether; it is now establishing a theory of the conservation of energy, which supplants the law of causality by tracing it into a deeper law of nature.

There is some force in this argument, but it cuts both ways. For, even if it be admitted that the category was successfully applied in the past, it is also admitted that it was applied without being understood; and it cannot now be questioned that the philosophers were right in rejecting it as the final explanation of the relation of objects to each other, and in pointing to other and higher connecting ideas. And this consideration should go some way towards convincing evolutionists that, though they may be able successfully to apply the idea of development to particular facts, this does not guarantee the soundness of their view of it as an instrument of thought, or of the nature of the final results which it is destined to achieve. Hence, without any disparagement to the new extension which science has received by the use of this new idea, it may be maintained that the ordinary view of its tendency and mission is erroneous.

"The prevailing method of explaining the world," says Professor Caird, "may be described as an attempt to level 'downwards.' The doctrine of development, interpreted as that idea usually is interpreted, supports this view, as making it necessary to trace back higher and more complex to lower or simpler forms of being; for the most obvious way of accomplishing this task is to show analytically that there is really nothing more in the former than in the latter."[A] "Divorced from matter," asks Professor Tyndall, "where is life to be found? Whatever our faith may say our knowledge shows them to be indissolubly joined. Every meal we eat, and every cup we drink, illustrates the mysterious control of Mind by Matter. Trace the line of life backwards and see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition."[B] And then, rising to the height of his subject, or even above it, he proclaims, "By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life."[C] A little further on, speaking in the name of science, and on behalf of his scientific fellow-workers (with what right is a little doubtful), he adds—"We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science, must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it." But if science is to control the knowable world, he generously leaves the remainder for religion. He will not deprive it of a faith in "a Power absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of man. As little in our days as in the days of Job can a man by searching find this Power out." And, now that he has left this empty sphere of the unknown to religion, he feels justified in adding, "There is, you will observe, no very rank materialism here."

[Footnote A: The Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. I. p. 34]

[Footnote B: Address to the British Association, 1874, p. 54.]

[Footnote C: Belfast Address, 1874.]

"Yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way, With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway."[A]

[Footnote A: Clerk Maxwell: "Notes of the President's Address," British Association, 1874.]

Now these declarations of Mr. Tyndall are, to say the least, somewhat ambiguous and shadowy. Yet, when he informs us that eating and drinking "illustrate the control of mind by matter," and "that the line of life traced backwards leads towards a purely physical condition," it is a little difficult to avoid the conclusion that he regards science as destined.

"To tread the world Into a paste, and thereof make a smooth Uniform mound, whereon to plant its flag."[B]

[Footnote B: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

For the conclusion of the whole argument seems to be, that all we know as facts are mere forms of matter; although the stubborn refusal of consciousness to be resolved into natural force, and its power of constructing for itself a world of symbols, gives science no little trouble, and forces it to acknowledge complete ignorance of the nature of the power from which all comes.

"So roll things to the level which you love, That you could stand at ease there and survey The universal Nothing undisgraced By pert obtrusion of some old church-spire I' the distance! "[A]

[Footnote A: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

Some writers on ethics and religion have adopted the same view of the goal of the idea of evolution. In consistency with this supposed tendency of science, to resolve all things into their simplest, and earliest forms, religion has been traced back to the superstition and ghost-worship of savages; and then it has been contended that it is, in essence, nothing more than superstition and ghost-worship. And, in like manner, morality, with its categorical imperative of duty, has been traced back, without a break, to the ignorant fear of the vengeance of a savage chief. A similar process in the same direction reduces the love divine, of which our poet speaks, into brute lust; somewhat sublimated, it is true, in its highest forms, but not fundamentally changed.

"Philosophers deduce you chastity Or shame, from just the fact that at the first Whoso embraced a woman in the field, Threw club down and forewent his brains beside; So, stood a ready victim in the reach Of any brother-savage, club in hand. Hence saw the use of going out of sight In wood or cave to prosecute his loves."[B]

[Footnote B: Bishop Blouhram's Apology.]

And when the sacred things of life are treated in this manner—when moral conduct is showed to be evolved by a continuous process from "conduct in general," the conduct of an "infusorium or a cephalopod," or even of wind-mills or water-wheels, it is not surprising if the authority of the moral law seems to be undermined, and that "devout souls" are apprehensive of the results of science. "Does law so analyzed coerce you much?" asks Browning.

The derivation of spiritual from natural laws thus appears to be fatal to the former; and religious teachers naturally think that it is necessary for their cause to snap the links of the chain of evolution, and, like Professor Drummond, to establish absolute gaps, not only between the inorganic and the organic worlds, but also between the self-conscious life of man and the mysterious, spiritual life of Christ, or God. But it seems to me that, in their antagonism to evolution, religious teachers are showing the same incapacity to distinguish between their friends and their foes, which they previously manifested in their acceptance of the Kantian doctrine of "things in themselves,"—a doctrine which placed God and the soul beyond the power of speculative reason either to prove or disprove. It is, however, already recognized that the attempt of Mansel and Hamilton to degrade human reason for the behoof of faith was really a veiled agnosticism; and a little reflection must show that the idea of evolution, truly interpreted, in no wise threatens the degradation of man, or the overthrow of his spiritual interests. On the contrary, this idea is, in all the history of thought, the first constructive hypothesis which is adequate to the uses of ethics and religion. By means of it, we may hope to solve many of the problems arising from the nature of knowledge and moral conduct, which the lower category of cause turned into pure enigmas. It seems, indeed, to contain the promise of establishing the science of man, as intelligent, on a firm basis; on which we may raise a superstructure, comparable in strength and superior in worth, to that of the science of nature. And, even if the moral science must, like philosophy, always return to the beginning—must, that is, from the necessity of its nature, and not from any complete failure—it will still begin again at a higher level now that the idea of evolution is in the field.

It now remains to show in what way the idea of evolution leaves room for religion and morality; or, in other words, to show how, so far from degrading man to the level of the brute condition, and running life down into "purely physical conditions," it contains the promise of establishing that idealistic view of the world, which is maintained by art and religion.

In order to show this, it is necessary that the idea of evolution should be used fearlessly, and applied to all facts that can in any way come under it. It must, in other words, be used as a category of thought, whose application is universal; so that, if it is valid at all as a theory, it is valid of all finite things. For the question we are dealing with is not the truth of the hypothesis of a particular science, but the truth of a hypothesis as to the relation of all objects in the world, including man himself. We must not be deterred from this universal application by the fact that we cannot, as yet, prove its truth in every detail. No scientific hypothesis ever has exhausted its details. I consider, therefore, that Mr. Tyndall had a complete right to "cross the boundary of the experimental evidence by an intellectual necessity"; for the necessity comes from the assumption of a possible explanation by the aid of the hypothesis. It is no argument against such a procedure to insist that, as yet, there is no proof of the absolute continuity of matter and physical life, or that the dead begets the living. The hypothesis is not disproved by the absence of evidence; it is only not proved. The connection may be there, although we have not, as yet, been able to find it. In the face of such difficulties as these, the scientific investigator has always a right to claim more time; and his attitude is impregnable as long as he remembers, as Mr. Tyndall did on the whole, that his hypothesis is a hypothesis.

But Mr. Tyndall has himself given up this right. He, like Mr. Huxley, has placed the phenomena of self-consciousness outside of the developing process, and confined the sphere in which evolution is applicable, to natural objects. Between objects and the subject, even when both subject and object are man himself, there lies "an impassable gulf."

Even to try "to comprehend the connection between thought and thing is absurd, like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his own waist-band." Our states of self-consciousness are symbols only—symbols of an outside entity, whose real nature we can never know. We know only these states; we only infer "that anything answering to our impressions exists outside of ourselves." And it is impossible to justify even that inference; for, if we can only know states of consciousness, we cannot say that they are symbols of anything, or that there is anything to be symbolized. The external world, on this theory, ceases to exist even as an unknown entity. In triumphantly pointing out that, in virtue of this psychological view, "There is, you will observe, no very rank materialism here," Mr. Tyndall forgets that he has destroyed the basis of all natural science, and reduced evolution into a law of "an outside entity," of which we can never know anything, and any inference regarding which violates every law of thought.

It seems to me quite plain that either this psychological theory, which Mr. Tyndall has mistaken for a philosophy, is invalid; or else it is useless to endeavour to propound any view regarding a "nature which is the phantom of the individual's mind." I prefer the science of Mr. Tyndall (and of Mr. Huxley, too) to his philosophy; and he would have escaped materialism more effectively, if he had remained faithful to his theory of evolution. It is a disloyalty, not only to science, but to thought, to cast away our categories when they seem to imply inconvenient consequences. They must be valid universally, if they are valid at all.

Mr. Tyndall contends that nature makes man, and he finds evidence in the fact that we eat and drink, "of the control of mind by matter." Now, it seems to me, that if nature makes man, then nature makes man's thoughts also. His sensations, feelings, ideas, notions, being those of a naturally-evolved agent, are revelations of the potency of the primal matter, just as truly as are the buds, flowers, and fruits of a tree. No doubt, we cannot as yet "comprehend the connection" between nervous action and sensation, any more than we can comprehend the connection between inorganic and organic existence. But, if the absence of "experimental evidence" does not disprove the hypothesis in the one case, it can not disprove it in the other. There are two crucial points in which the theory has not been established.

But, in both cases alike, there is the same kind of evidence that the connection exists; although in neither case can we, as yet, discover what it is. Plants live by changing inorganic elements into organic structure; and man is intelligent only in so far as he crosses over the boundary between subject and object, and knows the world without him. There is no "impassable gulf separating the subject and object"; if there were we could not know anything of either. There are not two worlds—the one of thoughts, the other of things—which are absolutely exclusive of each other, but one universe in which thought and reality meet. Mr. Tyndall thinks that it is an inference (and an inference over an impassable gulf!) that anything answering to our impressions exists outside ourselves. "The question of the external world is the great battleground of metaphysics," he quotes approvingly from Mr. J.S. Mill. But the question of the external world is not whether that world exists; it is, how are we to account for our knowledge that it does exist. The inference is not from thoughts to things, nor from things to thoughts, but from a partially known world to a systematic theory of that world. Philosophy is not engaged on the foolish enterprise of trying to discover whether the world exists, or whether we know that it exists; its problem is how to account for our knowledge. It asks what must the nature of things be, seeing that they are known; and what is the nature of thought, seeing that it knows facts?

There is no hope whatsoever for ethics, or religion, or philosophy—no hope even for science—in a theory which would apply evolution all the way up from inorganic matter to life, but which would postulate an absolute break at consciousness. The connection between thought and things is there to begin with, whether we can account for it or not; if it were not, then natural science would be impossible. It would be palpably irrational even to try to find out the nature of things by thinking. The only science would be psychology, and even that would be the science of "symbols of an unknown entity." What symbols of an unknown can signify, or how an unknown can produce symbols of itself across an impassable gulf—Mr. Spencer, Mr. Huxley, and Mr. Tyndall have yet to inform us.

It is the more necessary to insist on this, because the division between thought and matter, which is admitted by these writers, is often grasped at by their opponents, as a means of warding off the results which they draw from the theory of evolution. When science breaks its sword, religion assails it, with the fragment. It is not at once evident that if this chasm were shown to exist, knowledge would be a chimera; for there would be no outer world at all, not even a phenomenal one, to supply an object for it. We must postulate the ultimate unity of all beings with each other and with the mind that knows them, just because we are intellectual and moral beings; and to destroy this unity is to "kill reason itself, as it were, in the eye," as Milton said.

Now, evolution not only postulates unity, or the unbroken continuity of all existence, but it also negates all differences, except those which are expressions of that unity. It is not the mere assertion of a substratum under qualities; but it implies that the substratum penetrates into the qualities, and manifests itself in them. That which develops—be it plant, child, or biological kingdom—is, at every stage from lowest to highest, a concrete unity of all its differences; and in the whole history of its process its actual content is always the same. The environment of the plant evokes that content, but it adds nothing to it. No addition of anything absolutely new, no external aggregation, no insertion of anything alien into a growing thing, is possible. What it is now, it was in the beginning; and what it will be, it is now. Granting the hypothesis of evolution, there can be no quarrel with the view that the crude beginnings of things, matter in its most nebulous state, contains potentially all the rich variety of both natural and spiritual life.

But this continuity of all existence may be interpreted in two very different ways. It may lead us either to radically change our notions of mind and its activities, or "to radically change our notions of matter." We may take as the principle of explanation, either the beginning, or the end of the process of development. We may say of the simple and crass, "There is all that your rich universe really means"; or we may say of the spiritual activities of man, "This is what your crude beginning really was." We may explain the complex by the simple, or the simple by the complex. We may analyze the highest back into the lowest, or we may follow the lowest, by a process of synthesis, up to the highest.

And one of the most important of all questions for morality and religion is the question, which of these two methods is valid. If out of crass matter is evolved all animal and spiritual life, does that prove life to be nothing but matter; or does it not rather show that what we, in our ignorance, took to be mere matter was really something much greater? If "crass matter" contains all this promise and potency, by what right do we still call it "crass"? It is manifestly impossible to treat the potencies, assumed to lie in a thing that grows, as if they were of no significance; first, to assert that such potencies exist, in saying that the object develops; and then, to neglect them, and to regard the effect as constituted merely of its simplest elements. Either these potencies are not in the object, or else the object has in it, and is, at the first, more than it appears to be. Either the object does not grow, or the lowest stage of its being is no explanation of its true nature.

If we wish to know what the forms of natural life mean, we look in vain to their primary state. We must watch the evolution and revelation of the secret hid in natural life, as it moves through the ascending cycles of the biological kingdom. The idea of evolution, when it is not muddled, is synthetic—not analytic; it explains the simplest in the light of the complex, the beginning in the light of the end, and not vice versa. In a word, it follows the ways of nature, the footsteps of fact, instead of inventing a wilful backward path of its own. And nature explains by gradually expanding. If we hearken to nature, and not to the voice of illusory preconceptions, we shall hear her proclaim at the last stage, "Here is the meaning of the seedling. Now it is clear what it really was; for the power which lay dormant has pushed itself into light, through bud and flower and leaf and fruit." The reality of a growing thing is its highest form of being. The last explains the first, but not the first the last. The first is abstract, incomplete, not yet actual, but mere potency; and we could never know even the potency, except in the light of its own actualization.

From this correction of the abstract view of development momentous consequences follow. If the universe is, as science pronounces, an organic totality, which is ever converting its promise and potency into actuality, then we must add that the ultimate interpretation even of the lowest existence in the world cannot be given except on principles which are adequate to explain the highest. We must "level up and not level down": we must not only deny that matter can explain spirit, but we must say that even matter itself cannot be fully understood, except as an element in a spiritual world."[A]

[Footnote A: Professor Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Kant, p. 35.]

That the idea of evolution, even when applied in this consistent way, has difficulties of its own, it is scarcely necessary to say. But there is nothing in it which imperils the ethical and religious interests of humanity, or tends to reduce man into a natural phenomenon. Instead of degrading man, it lifts nature into a manifestation of spirit. If it were established, if every link of the endless chain were discovered and the continuity of existence were irrefragably proved, science would not overthrow idealism, but it would rather vindicate it. It would justify in detail the attempt of poetry and religion and philosophy, to interpret all being as the "transparent vesture" of reason, or love, or whatever other power in the world is regarded as highest.

I have now arrived at the conclusion that was sought. I have tried to show, not only that the attempt to interpret nature in terms of man is not a superstitious anthropomorphism, but that such an interpretation is implied in all rational thought. In other words, self-consciousness is the key to all the problems of nature. Science, in its progress, is gradually substituting one category for the other, and every one of these categories is at once a law of thought and a law of things as known. Each category, successively adopted, lifts nature more to the level of man; and the last category of modern thought, namely, development, constrains us so to modify our views of nature, as to regard it as finally explicable only in the terms of spirit. Thus, the movement of science is towards idealism. Instead of lowering man, it elevates nature into a potency of that which is highest and best in man. It represents the life of man, in the language of philosophy, as the return of the highest to itself; or in the language of our poet, and of religion, as a manifestation of infinite love. The explanation of nature from the principle of love, if it errs, errs "because it is not anthropomorphic enough," not because it is too anthropomorphic; it is not too high and concrete a principle, but too low and abstract.

It now remains to show that the poet, in employing the idea of evolution, was aware of its upward direction. I have already quoted a few passages which indicate that he had detected the false use of it. I shall now quote a few others in which he shows a consciousness of its true meaning:

"'Will you have why and wherefore, and the fact Made plain as pike-staff?' modern Science asks. 'That mass man sprung from was a jelly-lump Once on a time; he kept an after course Through fish and insect, reptile, bird and beast, Till he attained to be an ape at last, Or last but one. And if this doctrine shock In aught the natural pride.'"[A]

[Footnote A: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

"Not at all," the poet interrupts the man of science: "Friend, banish fear!"

"I like the thought He should have lodged me once I' the hole, the cave, the hut, the tenement, The mansion and the palace; made me learn The feel o' the first, before I found myself Loftier i' the last."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

This way upward from the lowest stage through every other to the highest, that is, the way of development, so far from lowering us to the brute level, is the only way for us to attain to the true highest, namely, the all-complete.

"But grant me time, give me the management And manufacture of a model me, Me fifty-fold, a prince without a flaw,— Why, there's no social grade, the sordidest, My embryo potentate should brink and scape. King, all the better he was cobbler once, He should know, sitting on the throne, how tastes Life to who sweeps the doorway."[A]

[Footnote A: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

But then, unfortunately, we have no time to make our kings in this way,

"You cut probation short, And, being half-instructed, on the stage You shuffle through your part as best you can."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

God, however, "takes time." He makes man pass his apprenticeship in all the forms of being. Nor does the poet

"Refuse to follow farther yet I' the backwardness, repine if tree and flower, Mountain or streamlet were my dwelling-place Before I gained enlargement, grew mollusc."[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid.]

It is, indeed, only on the supposition of having been thus evolved from inanimate being that he is able to account

"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.

"To each mortal peradventure earth becomes a new machine, Pain and pleasure no more tally in our sense than red and green."[A]

[Footnote A: La Saisiaz.]

The first result of this subjective view of knowledge is clearly enough seen by the poet. He is well aware that his convictions regarding the high matters of human destiny are valid only for himself.

"Only for myself I speak, Nowise dare to play the spokesman for my brothers strong and weak."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

Experience, as he interprets it, that is, present consciousness, "this moment's me and mine," is too narrow a basis for any universal or objective conclusion. So far as his own inner experience of pain and pleasure goes,

"All—for myself—seems ordered wise and well Inside it,—what reigns outside, who can tell?"[A]

[Footnote A: Francis Furini.]

But as to the actual world, he can have no opinion, nor, from the good and evil that apparently play around him, can he deduce either

"Praise or blame of its contriver, shown a niggard or profuse In each good or evil issue."[B]

[Footnote B: La Saisiaz.]

The moral government of the world is a subject, regarding which we are doomed to absolute ignorance. A theory that it is ruled by the "prince of the power of the air" has just as much, and just as little, validity as the more ordinary view held by religious people. Who needs be told

"The space Which yields thee knowledge—do its bounds embrace Well-willing and wise-working, each at height? Enough: beyond thee lies the infinite— Back to thy circumscription!"[C]

[Footnote C: Francis Furini.]

And our ignorance of God, and the world, and ourselves is matched by a similar ignorance regarding moral matters.

"Ignorance overwraps his moral sense, Winds him about, relaxing, as it wraps, So much and no more than lets through perhaps The murmured knowledge—' Ignorance exists.'"[D]

[Footnote D: Ibid.]

We cannot be certain even of the distinction and conflict of good and evil in the world. They, too, and the apparent choice between them to which man is continually constrained, may be mere illusions—phenomena of the individual consciousness. What remains, then? Nothing but to "wait."

"Take the joys and bear the sorrows—neither with extreme concern! Living here means nescience simply: 'tis next life that helps to learn."[A]

[Footnote A: La Saisiaz.]

It is hardly necessary to enter upon any detailed criticism of such a theory of knowledge as this, which is proffered by the poet. It is well known by all those who are in some degree acquainted with the history of philosophy—and it will be easily seen by all who have any critical acumen—that it leads directly into absolute scepticism. And absolute scepticism is easily shown to be self-contradictory. For a theory of nescience, in condemning all knowledge and the faculty of knowledge, condemns itself. If nothing is true, or if nothing is known, then this theory itself is not true, or its truth cannot be known. And if this theory is true, then nothing is true; for this theory, like all others, is the product of a defective intelligence. In whatsoever way the matter is put, there is left no standing-ground for the human critic who condemns human thought. And he cannot well pretend to a footing in a sphere above man's, or below it. There is thus one presupposition which every one must make, if he is to propound any doctrine whatsoever, even if that doctrine be that no doctrine can be valid; it is the presupposition that knowledge is possible, and that truth can be known. And this presupposition fills, for modern philosophy, the place of the Cogito ergo sum of Descartes. It is the starting-point and criterion of all knowledge.

It is, at first sight, a somewhat difficult task to account for the fact, that so keen an intellect as the poet's did not perceive the conclusion to which his theory of knowledge so directly and necessarily leads. It is probable, however, that he never critically examined it, but simply accepted it as equivalent to the common doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, which, in some form or other, all the schools of philosophy adopt. But the main reason will be found to lie in the fact that knowledge was not, to Browning, its own criterion or end. The primary fact of his philosophy is that human life is a moral process. His interest in the evolution of character was his deepest interest, as he informs us; he was an ethical teacher rather than a metaphysician. He is ever willing to asperse man's intelligence. But that man is a moral agent he will in no wise doubt. This is his

"Solid standing-place amid The wash and welter, whence all doubts are bid Back to the ledge they break against in foam."[A]

[Footnote A: Francis Furini.]

His practical maxim was

"Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust As wholly love allied to ignorance! There lies thy truth and safety."[B]

[Footnote B: A Pillar of Sebzevar.]

All phenomena must, in some way or other, be reconciled by the poet with the fundamental and indubitable fact of the progressive moral life of man. For the fundamental presupposition which a man makes, is necessarily his criterion of knowledge, and it determines the truth or illusoriness of all other opinions whatsoever.

Now, Browning held, not only that no certain knowledge is attainable by man, but also that such certainty is incompatible with moral life. Absolute knowledge would, he contends, lift man above the need and the possibility of making the moral choice, which is our supreme business on earth. Man can be good or evil, only on condition of being in absolute uncertainty regarding the true meaning of the facts of nature and the phenomena of life.

This somewhat strange doctrine finds the most explicit and full expression in La Saisiaz. "Fancy," amongst the concessions it demands from "Reason," claims that man should know—not merely surmise or fear—that every action done in this life awaits its proper and necessary meed in the next.

"I also will that man become aware Life has worth incalculable, every moment that he spends So much gain or loss for that next life which on this life depends."[A]

[Footnote A: La Saisiaz.]

But Reason refuses the concession, upon the ground that such sure knowledge would be destructive of the very distinction between right and wrong, which the demand implies. The "promulgation of this decree," by Fancy, "makes both good and evil to cease." Prior to it "earth was man's probation-place"; but under this decree man is no longer free; for certain knowledge makes action necessary.

"Once lay down the law, with Nature's simple 'Such effects succeed Causes such, and heaven or hell depends upon man's earthly deed Just as surely as depends the straight or else the crooked line On his making point meet point or with or else without incline,' Thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing what he must."[A]

[Footnote A: La Saisiaz, 195.]

If we presuppose that "man, addressed this mode, be sound and sane" (and we must stipulate sanity, if his actions are to be morally judged at all)—then a law which binds punishment and reward to action in a necessary manner, and is known so to bind them, would "obtain prompt and absolute obedience." There are some "edicts, now styled God's own nature's," "which to hear means to obey." All the laws relating to the preservation of life are of this character. And, if the law—"Would'st thou live again, be just"—were in all ways as stringent as the other law—

"Would'st thou live now, regularly draw thy breath! For, suspend the operation, straight law's breach results in death"—[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

then no one would disobey it, nor could. "It is the liberty of doing evil that gives the doing good a grace." And that liberty would be taken away by complete assurance, that effects follow actions in the moral world with the necessity seen in the natural sphere. Since, therefore, man is made to grow, and earth is the place wherein he is to pass probation and prove his powers, there must remain a certain doubt as to the issues of his actions; conviction must not be so strong as to carry with it man's whole nature. "The best I both see and praise, the worst I follow," is the adage rife in man's mouth regarding his moral conduct. But, spite of his seeing and praising,

"he disbelieves In the heart of him that edict which for truth his head receives."[A]

[Footnote A: La Saisiaz.]

He has a dim consciousness of ways whereby he may elude the consequences of his wickedness, and of the possibility of making amends to law.

"And now, auld Cloots, I ken ye're thinkin', A certain Bardie's rantin', drinkin', Some luckless hour will send him linkin' To your black pit; But, faith, he'll turn a corner jinkin', And cheat you yet."

The more orthodox and less generous individual is prone to agree, as regards himself, with Burns; but, he sees, most probably, that such an escape is impossible to others. He has secret solacement in a latent belief that he himself is an exception. There will be a special method of dealing with him. He is a "chosen sample"; and "God will think twice before He damns a man of his quality." It is just because there is such doubt as to the universality and necessity of the law which connects actions and consequences in the moral sphere, that man's deeds have an ethical character; while, to disperse doubt and ignorance by the assurance of complete knowledge, would take the good from goodness and the ill from evil.

In this ingenious manner, the poet turns the imperfect intellect and delusive knowledge of man to a moral use. Ordinarily, the intellectual impotence of man is regarded as carrying with it moral incapacity as well, and the delusiveness of knowledge is one of the strongest arguments for pessimism. To persons pledged to the support of no theory, and to those who have the naivete, so hard to maintain side by side with strong doctrinal convictions, it seems amongst the worst of evils that man should be endowed with fallacious faculties, and cursed with a futile desire for true knowledge which is so strong, that it cannot be quenched even in those who believe that truth can never be attained. It is the very best men of the world who cry

"Oh, this false for real, This emptiness which feigns solidity,— Ever some grey that's white, and dun that's black,— When shall we rest upon the thing itself, Not on its semblance? Soul—too weak, forsooth, To cope with fact—wants fiction everywhere! Mine tires of falsehood: truth at any cost!"[A]

[Footnote A: A Bean-Stripe.]

The poet himself was burdened in no small degree with this vain desire for knowing the truth; and he recognized, too, that he was placed in a world which seems both real and beautiful, and so well worth knowing. Yet, it is this very failure of knowledge—a failure which, be it remembered, is complete and absolute, because, as he thinks, all facts must turn into phantoms by mere contact with our "relative intelligences,"—which he constitutes into the basis of his optimistic faith.

So high is the dignity and worth of the moral life to Browning, that no sacrifice is too great to secure it. And, indeed, if it were once clearly recognized that there is no good thing but goodness, nothing of supreme worth, except the realization of a loving will, then doubt, ignorance, and every other form of apparent evil would be fully justified—provided they were conditions whereby this highest good is attained. And, to Browning, ignorance was one of the conditions. And consequently, the dread pause in the music which agnosticism brings, is only "silence implying sound"; and the vain cry for truth, arising from the heart of the earth's best men, is only a discord moving towards resolution into a more rapturous harmony.

I do not stay here to inquire whether sure knowledge would really have this disastrous effect of destroying morality, or whether its failure does not rather imply the impossibility of a moral life. I return to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter, and which it is now possible to answer. That question was: How does Browning reconcile his hypothesis of universal love with the natural and moral evils existing in the world?

His answer is quite explicit. The poet solves the problem by casting doubt upon the facts which threaten his hypothesis. He reduces them into phenomena, in the sense of phantoms begotten by the human intellect upon unknown and unknowable realities.

"Thus much at least is clearly understood— Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge—just so much as shows that still It ends in ignorance on every side."[A]

[Footnote A: Francis Furini.]

He is aware of the phenomena of his own consciousness,

"My soul, and my soul's home, This body ";

but he knows not whether "things outside are fact or feigning." And he heeds little, for in either case they

"Teach What good is and what evil,—just the same, Be feigning or be fact the teacher."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

It is the mixture, or rather the apparent mixture, of shade and light in life, the conflict of seeming good with seeming evil in the world, that constitutes the world a probation-place. It is a kind of moral gymnasium, crowded with phantoms, wherein by exercise man makes moral muscle. And the vigour of the athlete's struggle is not in the least abated by the consciousness that all he deals with are phantoms.

"I have lived, then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught This—there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught, Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim, If—(to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!)— If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place, And life, time—with all their chances, changes,—just probation-space, Mine, for me."[A]

[Footnote A: La Saisiaz.]

And the world would not be such a probation-space did we once penetrate into its inmost secret, and know its phenomena as veritably either good or evil. There is the need of playing something perilously like a trick on the human intellect if man is to strive and grow.

"Here and there a touch Taught me, betimes, the artifice of things— That all about, external to myself, Was meant to be suspected,—not revealed Demonstrably a cheat—but half seen through."[B]

[Footnote B: A Bean-Stripe.]

To know objects as they veritably are, might reveal all things as locked together in a scheme of universal good, so that "white would rule unchecked along the line." But this would be the greatest of disasters; for, as moral agents, we cannot do without

"the constant shade Cast on life's shine,—the tremor that intrudes When firmest seems my faith in white."[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid.]

The intellectual insight that would penetrate through the vari-colour of events into the actual presence of the incandescent white of love, which glows, as hope tells us, in all things, would stultify itself, and lose its knowledge even of the good.

"Think! Could I see plain, be somehow certified All was illusion—evil far and wide Was good disguised,—why, out with one huge wipe Goes knowledge from me. Type needs antitype: As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good Needs evil: how were pity understood Unless by pain? "[A]

[Footnote A: Francis Furini.]

Good and evil are relative to each other, and each is known only through its contrary.

"For me (Patience, beseech you!) Knowledge can but be Of good by knowledge of good's opposite— Evil."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

The extinction of one of the terms would be the extinction of the other. And, in a similar manner, clear knowledge that evil is illusion and that all things have their place in an infinite divine order would paralyze all moral effort, as well as stultify itself.

"Make evident that pain Permissibly masks pleasure—you abstain From out-stretch of the finger-tip that saves A drowning fly."[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid.]

Certainty on either side, either that evil is evil for evermore, irredeemable and absolute, a drench of utter dark not illuminable by white; or that it is but mere show and semblance, which the good takes upon itself, would alike be ruinous to man. For both alternatives would render all striving folly. The right attitude for man is that of ignorance, complete uncertainty, the equipoise of conflicting alternatives. He must take his stand on the contradiction. Hope he may have that all things work together for good. It is right that he should nourish the faith that the antagonism of evil with good in the world is only an illusion; but that faith must stop short of the complete conviction that knowledge would bring. When, therefore, the hypothesis of universal love is confronted with the evils of life, and we ask how it can be maintained in the face of the manifold miseries everywhere apparent, the poet answers, "You do not know, and cannot know, whether they are evils or not. Your knowledge remains at the surface of things. You cannot fit them into their true place, or pronounce upon their true purpose and character; for you see only a small arc of the complete circle of being. Wait till you see more, and, in the meantime, hope!"

"Why faith—but to lift the load, To leaven the lump, where lies Mind prostrate through knowledge owed To the loveless Power it tries To withstand, how vain!"[A]

[Footnote A: Reverie—Asolando.]

And, if we reply in turn, that this necessary ignorance leaves as little room for his scheme of love as it does for its opposite, he again answers: "Not so! I appeal from the intellect, which is detected as incompetent, to the higher court of the moral consciousness. And there I find the ignorance to be justified: for it is the instrument of a higher purpose, a means whereby what is best is gained, namely, Love."

"My curls were crowned In youth with knowledge,—off, alas, crown slipped Next moment, pushed by better knowledge still Which nowise proved more constant; gain, to-day, Was toppling loss to-morrow, lay at last —Knowledge, the golden?—lacquered ignorance! As gain—mistrust it! Not as means to gain: Lacquer we learn by: ... The prize is in the process: knowledge means Ever-renewed assurance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach, But love is victory, the prize itself: Love—trust to! Be rewarded for the trust In trust's mere act."[A]

[Footnote A: A Pillar at Sebzevar.]

Now, in order to complete our examination of this theory, we must follow the poet in his attempt to escape from the testimony of the intellect to that of the heart. In order to make the most of the latter, we find that Browning, especially in his last work, tends to withdraw his accusation of utter incompetence on the part of the intellect. He only tends to do so, it is true. He is tolerably consistent in asserting that we know our own emotions and the phenomena of our own consciousness; but he is not consistent in his account of our knowledge, or ignorance, of external things. On the whole, he asserts that we know nothing of them. But in Asolando he seems to imply that the evidence of a loveless power in the world, permitting evil, is irresistible.[A] To say the least, the testimony of the intellect, such as it is, is more clear and convincing with regard to evil than it is with regard to good. Within the sphere of phenomena, to which the intellect is confined, there seems to be, instead of a benevolent purpose, a world ruled by a power indifferent to the triumph of evil over good, and either "loveless" or unintelligent.

[Footnote A: See passage just quoted.]

"Life, from birth to death, Means—either looking back on harm escaped, Or looking forward to that harm's return With tenfold power of harming."[B]

[Footnote B: A Bean-Stripe.]

And it is not possible for man to contravene this evidence of faults and omissions: for, in doing so, he would remove the facts in reaction against which his moral nature becomes active. What proof is there, then, that the universal love is no mere dream? None! from the side of the intellect, answers the poet. Man, who has the will to remove the ills of life,

"Stop change, avert decay, Fix life fast, banish death,"[C]

[Footnote C: Reverie—Asolando.]

has not the power to effect his will; while the Power, whose limitlessness he recognizes everywhere around him, merely maintains the world in its remorseless course, and puts forth no helping hand when good is prone and evil triumphant. "God does nothing."

"'No sign,'—groaned he,— No stirring of God's finger to denote He wills that right should have supremacy On earth, not wrong! How helpful could we quote But one poor instance when He interposed Promptly and surely and beyond mistake Between oppression and its victim, closed Accounts with sin for once, and bade us wake From our long dream that justice bears no sword, Or else forgets whereto its sharpness serves.'"[A]

[Footnote A: Bernard de Mandeville.]

But he tells us in his later poems, that there is no answer vouchsafed to man's cry to the Power, that it should reveal

"What heals all harm, Nay, hinders the harm at first, Saves earth."[B]

[Footnote B: Reverie—Asolando.]

And yet, so far as man can see, there were no bar to the remedy, if "God's all-mercy" did really "mate His all-potency."

"How easy it seems,—to sense Like man's—if somehow met Power with its match—immense Love, limitless, unbeset By hindrance on every side!"[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid.]

But that love nowhere makes itself evident. "Power," we recognize,

"finds nought too hard, Fulfilling itself all ways, Unchecked, unchanged; while barred, Baffled, what good began Ends evil on every side."[A]

[Footnote A: Reverie—Asolando.]

Thus, the conclusion to which knowledge inevitably leads us is that mere power rules.

"No more than the passive clay Disputes the potter's act, Could the whelmed mind disobey Knowledge, the cataract."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

But if the intellect is thus overwhelmed, so as to be almost passive to the pessimistic conclusion borne in upon it by "resistless fact," the heart of man is made of another mould. It revolts against the conclusion of the intellect, and climbs

"Through turbidity all between, From the known to the unknown here, Heaven's 'Shall be,' from earth's 'Has been.'"[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid.]

It grasps a fact beyond the reach of knowledge, namely, the possibility, or even the certainty, that "power is love." At present there is no substantiating by knowledge the testimony of the heart; and man has no better anchorage for his optimism than faith. But the closer view will come, when even our life on earth will be seen to have within it the working of love, no less manifest than that of power.

"When see? When there dawns a day, If not on the homely earth, Then, yonder, worlds away, Where the strange and new have birth, And Power comes full in play."[D]

[Footnote D: Ibid.]

Now, what is this evidence of the heart, which is sufficiently cogent and valid to counterpoise that of the mind; and which gives to "faith," or "hope," a firm foothold in the very face of the opposing "resistless" testimony of knowledge?

Within our experience, to which the poet knows we are entirely confined, there is a fact, the significance of which we have not as yet examined. For, plain and irresistible as is the evidence of evil, so plain and constant is man's recognition of it as evil, and his desire to annul it. If man's mind is made to acknowledge evil, his moral nature is made so as to revolt against it.

"Man's heart is made to judge Pain deserved nowhere by the common flesh Our birth-right—bad and good deserve alike No pain, to human apprehension."[A]

[Footnote A: Mihrab Shah—Ferishtah's Fancies.]

Owing to the limitation of our intelligence, we cannot deny but that

"In the eye of God Pain may have purpose and be justified."

But whether it has its purpose for the supreme intelligence or not,

"Man's sense avails to only see, in pain, A hateful chance no man but would avert Or, failing, needs must pity."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

Man must condemn evil, he cannot acquiesce in its permanence, but is, spite of his consciousness of ignorance and powerlessness, roused into constant revolt against it.

"True, he makes nothing, understands no whit: Had the initiator-spasm seen fit Thus doubly to endow him, none the worse And much the better were the universe. What does Man see or feel or apprehend Here, there, and everywhere, but faults to mend, Omissions to supply,—one wide disease Of things that are, which Man at once would ease Had will but power and knowledge?"[A]

[Footnote A: Francis Furini.]

But the moral worth of man does not suffer the least detraction from his inability to effect his benevolent purpose. "Things must take will for deed," as Browning tells us. David is not at all distressed by the consciousness of his weakness.

"Why is it I dare Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my despair? This;—'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do."[B]

[Footnote B: Saul.]

The fact that "his wishes fall through," that he cannot, although willing, help Saul, "grow poor to enrich him, fill up his life by starving his own," does not prevent him from regarding his "service as perfect." The will was there, although it lacked power to effect itself. The moral worth of an action is complete, if it is willed; and it is nowise affected by its outer consequences, as both Browning and Kant teach. The loving will, the inner act of loving, though it can bear no outward fruit, being debarred by outward impediment, is still a complete and highest good.