Browning, as we have seen, unhesitatingly adopts the latter alternative. He remains loyal to the deliverances of his moral consciousness and accepts as equally valid, beliefs which the intellect finds to be self-contradictory: holding that knowledge on such matters is impossible. And he rejects this knowledge, not only because our thoughts are self-contradictory in themselves, but because the failure of a speculative solution of these problems is necessary to morality. Clear, convincing, demonstrative knowledge would destroy morality; and the fact that the power to attain such knowledge has been withheld from us is to be regarded rather as an indication of the beneficence of God, who has not held even ignorance to be too great a price for man to pay for goodness.
Knowledge is not the fit atmosphere for morality. It is faith and not reason, hope and trust but not certainty, that lend vigour to the good life. We may believe, and rejoice in the belief, that the absolute good is fulfilling itself in all things, and that even the miseries of life are really its refracted rays—the light that gains in splendour by being broken. But we must not, and, indeed, cannot ascend from faith to knowledge. The heart may trust, and must trust, if it faithfully listens to its own natural voice; but reason must not demonstrate. Ignorance on the side of intellect, faith on the side of the emotions; distrust of knowledge, absolute confidence in love; such is the condition of man's highest welfare: it is only thus that the purpose of his life, and of the world which is his instrument, can be achieved.
No final estimate of the value of this theory of morals and religion can be made, without examining its philosophical presuppositions. Nor is such an examination in any way unfair; for it is obvious that Browning explicitly offers us a philosophical doctrine. He appeals to argument and not to artistic intuition; he offers a definite theory to which he claims attention, not on account of any poetic beauty that may lie within it, but on the ground that it is a true exposition of the moral nature of man. Kant's Metaphysic of Ethics is not more metaphysical in intention than the poet's later utterances on the problems of morality. In La Saisiaz, in Ferishtah's Fancies, in the Parleyings, and, though less explicitly, in Asolando, Fifine at the Fair, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, Browning definitely states, and endeavours to demonstrate a theory of knowledge, a theory of the relation of knowledge to morality, and a theory of the nature of evil; and he discusses the arguments for the immortality of the soul. In these poems his artistic instinct avails him, not as in his earlier ones, for the discovery of truth by way of intuition, but for the adornment of doctrines already derived from a metaphysical repository. His art is no longer free, no longer its own end, but coerced into an alien service. It has become illustrative and argumentative, and in being made to subserve speculative purposes, it has ceased to be creative. Browning has appealed to philosophy, and philosophy must try his cause.
Such, then, is Browning's theory; and I need make no further apology for discussing at some length the validity of the division which it involves between the intellectual and the moral life of man. Is it possible to combine the weakness of man's intelligence with the strength of his moral and religious life, and to find in the former the condition of the latter? Does human knowledge fail, as the poet considers it to fail? Is the intelligence of man absolutely incapable of arriving at knowledge of things as they are? If it does, if man cannot know the truth, can he attain goodness? These are the questions that must now be answered.
It is one of the characteristics of recent thought that it distrusts its own activity: the ancient philosophical "Scepticism" has been revived and strengthened. Side by side with the sense of the triumphant progress of natural science, there is a conviction, shared even by scientific investigators themselves, as well as by religious teachers and by many students of philosophy, that our knowledge has only limited and relative value, and that it always stops short of the true nature of things. The reason of this general conviction lies in the fact that thought has become aware of its own activity; men realize more clearly than they did in former times that the apparent constitution of things depends directly on the character of the intelligence which apprehends them.
This relativity of things to thought has, not unnaturally, suggested the idea that the objects of our knowledge are different from objects as they are. "That the real nature of things is very different from what we make of them, that thought and thing are divorced, that there is a fundamental antithesis between them," is, as Hegel said, "the hinge on which modern philosophy turns." Educated opinion in our day has lost its naive trust in itself. "The natural belief of man, it is true, ever gives the lie" to the doctrine that we do not know things. "In common life," adds Hegel, "we reflect without particularly noting that this is the process of arriving at the truth, and we think without hesitation and in the firm belief that thought coincides with things."A But, as soon as attention is directed to the process of thinking, and to the way in which the process affects our consciousness of the object, it is at once concluded that thought will never reach reality, that things are not given to us as they are, but distorted by the medium of sense and our intelligence, through which they pass. The doctrine of the relativity of knowledge is thus very generally regarded as equivalent to the doctrine that there is no true knowledge whatsoever. We know only phenomena, or appearances; and it is these, and not veritable facts, that we systematize into sciences. "We can arrange the appearances—the shadows of our cave—and that, for the practical purposes of the cave, is all that we require."B Not even "earth's least atom" can ever be known to us as it really is; it is for us, at the best,
A: Wallace's Translation of Hegel's Logic, p. 36.
B: Caird's Comte.
"An atom with some certain properties
Known about, thought of as occasion needs."C