usiness to acquire the moral and intellectual freedom, which
he has potentially from the first--

"Some fitter way express
Heart's satisfaction that the Past indeed
Is past, gives way before Life's best and last,
The all-including Future!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Gerard de Lairesse_.]

But, whether or not the new point of view renders some of the old
disputations of ethics meaningless, it is certain that Browning viewed
moral life as a growth through conflict.

"What were life
Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife
Through the ambiguous Present to the goal
Of some all-reconciling Future?"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

To become, to develop, to actualize by reaction against the natural and
moral environment, is the meaning both of the self and of the world it
works upon. "We are here to learn the good of peace through strife, of
love through hate, and reach knowledge by ignorance."

Now, since the conception of development is a self-contradictory one,
or, in other words, since it necessarily implies the conflict of the
ideal and actual in all life, and in every instant of its history, it
remains for us to determine more fully what are the warring elements in
human nature. What is the nature of this life of man, which, like all
life, is self-evolving; and by conflict with what does the evolution
take place? What is the ideal which condemns the actual, and yet
realizes itself by means of it; and what is the actual which wars
against the ideal, and yet contains it in potency, and reaches towards
it? That human life is conceived by Browning as a moral life, and not a
more refined and complex form of the natural life of plants and
animals--a view which finds its exponents in Herbert Spencer, and other
so-called evolutionists--it is scarcely necessary to assert. It is a
life which determines itself, and determines itself according to an idea
of goodness. That idea, moreover, because it is a _moral ideal_, must be
regarded as the conception of perfect and absolute goodness. Through the
moral end, man is ideally identified with God, who, indeed, is
necessarily conceived as man's moral ideal regarded as already and
eternally real. "God" and the "moral ideal" are, in truth, expressions
of the same idea; they convey the conception of perfect goodness from
different standpoints. And perfect goodness is, to Browning, limitless
love. Pleasure, wisdom, power, and even the beauty which art d