I' the lode were precious could one light on ore
Clarified up to test of crucible.
The prize is in the process: knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach."
For men with minds of the type of Spencer's, this negative assurance of an infinite ever on before is sufficient, but human beings, as a rule, will not rest satisfied in such cold abstractions. Though Job said thousands of years ago "Who by searching can find out God," mankind still continues to search.
Now comes Browning and says that it is in that very act of searching that the absolute becomes most directly manifest. From the earliest times of which we have any record man has been aspiring toward God. Many times he has thought that he had found God, but later discovered it to be only God's image built up out of his own human experiences. This search is very beautifully described in the Fancy called 'The Sun,' under the symbol of the man who seeks the prime giver that he may give thanks where it is due for a palatable fig. This search for God Browning calls Love, meaning by that the moving, aspiring force of the whole universe, and many are its manifestations, from the love that goes forth in thanks for benefits received, through the aspirations of the artist toward beauty, of the lover toward human sympathy, even of the scientist toward knowledge, to the lover of humanity like Ferishtah, who declares "I know nothing save that love I can boundlessly, endlessly."
The poet argues from this that if mankind has with ever increasing fervor aspired toward a God of Love, and has ever developed toward broader conceptions of human love, it is only reasonable to infer that in his nature God has something which corresponds to human love, though it transcend our most exalted imagining of it. In John Fiske's recent book 'Through Nature to God' he advances a theory identical with this, evidently unaware that Browning had been before him, for he claims it as entirely original. Fiske's originality consists in his having based his proof upon analogies drawn from the evolution of organic life in following out the law of the adjustment of inner to outer relations. For example, since the eye has through aeons of time gradually adjusted itself into harmony with light, why should not man's search for God be the gradual adjustment of the soul into harmony with the infinite spirit. Other modern thinkers have advanced the idea that love was the ruling force of the universe; nor need we confine ourselves to the moderns, for like nearly every phase of thought, it had its counterpart or at least its seed in Greek thought. Thus we find that Empedocles declared that the ruling forces of the universe were Love and Strife and that the conflict between these was necessary for the continuance of life. As far as I know, however, no other thinker or poet has emphasized with such power the thought that the only true basis of belief is the intuition of God that comes from the direct revelation of feeling in the human heart, and which has been at once the motive force of the search for God and the basis of a conception of God's nature. A natural corollary of such a theory is that every conception man has had of the Infinite had its value as a partial image since it grew out of the divine impulse planted in man, but that in the Christian ideal, the highest symbolical conception was attained through the mystical unfolding of love in the human soul.
The thought of the 'Fancies' is optimistically rounded out in 'A Bean Stripe also Apple Eating' in which Ferishtah argues that life, in spite of the evil in it, seems to him on the whole good, and he cannot believe that evil is not meant for good ends since he is so sure that God is infinite in love.
From all this it will be seen that our poet accepts with Spencerians the negative proof of God growing out of the failure of intellect, but adds to it the positive proof derived from emotion.