otnote 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 a