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s a good in evil, and a hope in ill success," and recognizes that mankind are "All with a touch of nobleness, despite Their error, upward tending all though weak; Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, But dream of him, and guess where he may be, And do their best to climb and get to him."[B] [Footnote B: _Ibid_.] "All this I knew not," adds Paracelsus, "and I failed. Let men take the lesson and press this lamp of love, 'God's lamp, close to their breasts'; its splendour, soon or late, will pierce the gloom," and show that the universe is a transparent manifestation of His beneficence. CHAPTER VII. BROWNING'S IDEALISM, AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL JUSTIFICATION. "Master, explain this incongruity! When I dared question, 'It is beautiful, But is it true?' thy answer was, 'In truth Lives Beauty.'"[A] [Footnote A: _Shah Abbas_.] We have now seen how Browning sought to explain all things as manifestations of the principle of love; how he endeavoured to bring all the variety of finite existence, and even the deep discrepancies of good and evil, under the sway of one idea. I have already tried to show that all human thought is occupied with the same task: science, art, philosophy, and even the most ordinary common-sense, are all, in their different ways, seeking for constant laws amongst changing facts. Nay, we may even go so far as to say that all the activity of man, the practical as well as the theoretical, is an attempt to establish a _modus vivendi_ between his environment and himself. And such an attempt rests on the assumption that there is some ground common to both of the struggling powers within and without, some principle that manifests itself both in man and in nature. So that all men are philosophers to the extent of postulating a unity, which is deeper than all differences; and all are alike trying to discover, in however limited or ignorant a way, what that unity is. If this fact were more constantly kept in view, the effort of philosophers to bring the ultimate colligating principles of thought into clear consciousness would not, at the outset at least, be regarded with so much suspicion. For the philosopher differs from the practical man of the world, not so much in the nature of the task which he is trying to accomplish, as in the distinct and conscious purpose with which he enters upon it. Now, I think that those, who, like Browning, offer an explicitly optimi
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