become."

In _Paracelsus_, _Fifine at the Fair_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_,
and many of his other poems, Browning deals with the problem of human
life from the point of view of development. And it is this point of
view, consistently held, which enables him to throw a new light on the
whole subject of ethics. For, if man be veritably a being in process of
evolution, if he be a permanent that always changes from earliest
childhood to old age, if he be a living thing, a potency in process of
actualization, then no fixed distinctions made with reference to him can
be true. If, for instance, it be asked whether man is rational or
irrational, free or bound, good or evil, God or brute, the true answer,
if he is veritably a being moving from ignorance to knowledge, from
wickedness to virtue, from bondage to freedom, is, that he is at once
neither of these alternatives and both. All hard terms of division, when
applied to a subject which grows, are untrue. If the life of man is a
self-enriching process, if he is _becoming_ good, and rational, and
free, then at no point in the movement is it possible to pass fixed and
definite judgments upon him. He must be estimated by his direction and
momentum, by the whence and whither of his life. There is a sense in
which man is from the first and always good, rational and free; for it
is only by the exercise of reason and freedom that he exists as man. But
there is also a sense in which he is none of these; for he is at the
first only a potency not yet actualized. He is not rational, but
becoming rational; not good, but becoming good; not free, but aspiring
towards freedom. It is his prayer that "in His light, he may see light
truly, and in His service find perfect freedom."

In this frank assumption of the point of view of development. Browning
suggests the question whether the endless debate regarding freedom, and
necessity, and other moral terms, may not spring from the fact, that
both of the opposing schools of ethics are fundamentally unfaithful to
the subject of their inquiry. They are treating a developing reality
from an abstract point of view, and taking for granted,--what cannot be
true of man, if he grows in intellectual power and moral goodness--that
he is _either_ good or evil, _either_ rational or irrational, _either_
free or bond, at every moment in the process. They are treating man from
a static, instead of from a kinetic point of view, and forgetting that
it is his b