Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

"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

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.