Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

A short reference to the moral consciousness may suggest the answer to this difficulty. In morality (as also is the case in knowledge) the moral ideal, or the objective law of goodness, grows in richness and fulness of content with the individual who apprehends it. His moral world is the counterpart of his moral growth as a character. Goodness for him directly depends upon his recognition of it. Animals, presumably, have no moral ideal, because they have not the power to constitute it. In morals, as in knowledge, the mind of man constructs its own world. And yet, in both alike, the world of truth or of goodness exists all the same whether the individual knows it or not. He does not call the moral law into being, but finds it without, and then realizes it in his own life. The moral law does not vanish and reappear with its recognition by mankind. It is not subject to the chances and changes of its life, but a good in itself that is eternal.

Is it therefore independent of all intelligence? Can goodness be anything but the law of a self-conscious being? Is it the quality or motive or ideal of a mere thing? Manifestly not. Its relation to self-consciousness is essential. With the extinction of self-consciousness all moral goodness is extinguished.

The same holds true of reality. The question of the reality or unreality of things cannot arise except in an intelligence. Animals have neither illusions nor truths—unless they are self-conscious. The reality, which man sets over against his own inadequate knowledge, is posited by him; and it has no meaning whatsoever except in this contrast. And to endeavour to conceive a reality which no one knows, is to assert a relative term without its correlative, which is absurd; it is to posit an ideal which is opposed to nothing actual.

In this view, so commonly held in our day, that knowledge is subjective and reality unknowable, we have another example of the falseness and inconsistency of abstract thinking. If this error be committed, there is no fundamental gain in saying with Kant, that things are relative to the thought of all, instead of asserting, with Berkeley or Browning, that they are relative to the thought of each. The final result is the same. Things as known, are reduced into mere creations of thought; things as they are, are regarded as not thoughts, and as partaking in no way of the nature of thought. And yet "reality" is virtually assumed to be given at the beginning of knowledge; for the sensations are supposed to be emanations from it, or roused in consciousness by it. These sensations, it is said, man does not make, but receives, and receives from the concealed reality. They flow from it, and are the manifestations of its activity. Then, in the next moment, reality is regarded as not given in any way, but as something to be discovered by the effort of thought; for we always strive to know things, and not phantoms. Lastly, the knowledge thus acquired being regarded as imperfect, and experience showing to us continually that every object has more in it than we know, the reality is pronounced to be unknowable, and all knowledge is regarded as failure, as acquaintance with mere phantoms. Thus, in thought, as in morality, the ideal is present at the beginning, it is an effort after explicit realization, and its process is never complete.

Now, all these aspects of the ideal of knowledge, that is, of reality, are held by the unsophisticated intelligence of man; and abstract philosophy is not capable of finally getting rid of any one of them. It, too, holds them alternately. Its denial of the possibility of knowing reality is refuted by its own starting-point; for it begins with a given something, regarded as real, and its very effort to know is an attempt to know that reality by thinking. But it forgets these facts, when it is discovered that knowledge at the best is incomplete. It is thus tossed from assertion to denial, and from denial to assertion; from one abstract or one-sided view of reality, to the other.

When these different aspects of truth are grasped together from the point of view of evolution, there seems to be a way of escaping the difficulties to which they give rise. For the ideal must be present at the beginning, and cannot be present in its fulness till the process is complete. What is here required is to lift our theory of man's knowledge to the level of our theory of his moral life, and to treat it frankly as the process whereby reality manifests itself in the mind of man. In that way, we shall avoid the absurdities of both of the abstract schools of philosophy, to both of which alike the native intelligence of man gives the lie. We shall say neither that man knows nothing, nor that he knows all; we shall regard his knowledge, neither as purely phenomenal and out of all contact with reality, nor as an actual identification with the real being of things in all their complex variety. For, in morality, we do not say either that the individual is absolutely evil, because his actions never realize the supreme ideal of goodness; nor, that he is at the last term of development, and "taking the place of God," because he lives as "ever in his great Taskmaster's eye." Just as every moral action, however good, leaves something still to be desiderated, something that may become a stepping-stone for new movement towards the ideal which it has failed to actualize; so all our knowledge of an object leaves something over that we have not apprehended, which is truer and more real than anything we know, and which in all future effort we strive to master. And, just as the very effort, to be good derives its impulse and direction from the ideal of goodness which is present, and striving for realization; so the effort to know derives its impulse and direction from the reality which is present, and striving for complete realization in the thought of man. We know reality confusedly from the first; and it is because we have attained so much knowledge, that we strive for greater clearness and fulness. It is by planting his foot on the world that man travels. It is by opposing his power to the given reality that his knowledge grows.

When once we recognize that reality is the ideal of knowledge, we are able to acknowledge all the truth that is in the doctrine of the phenomenalists, without falling into their errors and contradictions. We may go as far as the poet in confessing intellectual impotence, and roundly call the knowledge of man "lacquered ignorance." "Earth's least atom" does veritably remain an enigma. Man is actually flung back into his circumscribed sphere by every fact; and he will continue to be so flung to the end of time. He will never know reality, nor be able to hold up in his hand the very heart of the simplest thing in the world. For the world is an organic totality, and its simplest thing will not be seen, through and through, till everything is known, till every fact and event is related to every other under principles which are universal: just as goodness cannot be fully achieved in any act, till the agent is in all ways lifted to the level of absolute goodness. Physics cannot reveal the forces which keep a stone in its place on the earth, till it has traced the forces that maintain the starry systems in their course. No fact can be thoroughly known, i.e., known in its reality, till the light of the universe has been focussed upon it: and, on the other hand, to know any subject through and through would be to explain all being. The highest law and the essence of the simple fact, the universal and the particular, can only be known together, in and through one another. "Reality" in "the least atom" will be known, only when knowledge has completed its work, and the universe has become a transparent sphere, penetrated in every direction by the shafts of intelligence.

But this is only half the truth. If knowledge is never complete, it is always completing; if reality is never known, it is ever being known; if the ideal is never actual, it is always being actualized. The complete failure of knowledge is as impossible as its complete success. It is at no time severed from reality; it is never its mere adumbration, nor are its contents mere phenomena. On the contrary, it is reality partially revealed, the ideal incompletely actualized. Our very errors are the working of reality within us, and apart from it they would be impossible. The process towards truth by man is the process of truth in man; the movement of knowledge towards reality is the movement of reality into knowledge. A purely subjective consciousness which knows, such as the poet tried to describe, is a self-contradiction: it would be a consciousness at once related, and not related, to the actual world. But man has no need to relate himself to the world. He is already related, and his task is to understand that relation, or, in other words, to make both its terms intelligible. Man has no need to go out from himself to facts; his relation to facts is prior to his distinction from them. The truth is that he cannot entirely lift himself away from them, nor suspend his thoughts in the void. In his inmost being he is creation's voice, and in his knowledge he confusedly murmurs its deep thoughts.

Browning was aware of this truth in its application to man's moral nature. In speaking of the principle of love, he was not tempted to apply fixed alternatives. On the contrary, he detected in the "poorest love that was ever offered" the veritable presence of that which is perfect and complete, though never completely actualized. His interest in the moral development of man, and his penetrative moral insight, acting upon, and guided by the truths of the Christian religion, warned him, on this side, against the absolute separation of the ideal and actual, the divine and human. Human love, however poor in quality and limited in range, was to him God's love in man. It was a wave breaking in the individual of that First Love, which is ever flowing back through the life of humanity to its primal source. To him all moral endeavour is the process of this Primal Love; and every man, as he consciously identifies himself with it, may use the language of Scripture, and say, "It is not I that live, but Christ lives in me."