ofessed
agnostic can condemn the human intellect more utterly than he does. He
pushes the limitedness of human knowledge into a disqualification of it
to reach truth at all; and makes the conditions according to which we
know, or seem to know, into a deceiving necessity, which makes us know
wrongly.

"To know of, think about,--
Is all man's sum of faculty effects
When exercised on earth's least atom, Son!
What was, what is, what may such atom be?
No answer!"[B]

[Footnote B: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

Thought plays around facts, but never reaches them. Mind intervenes
between itself and its objects, and throws its own shadow upon them; nor
can it penetrate through that shadow, but deals with it as if it were
reality, though it knows all the time that it is not.

This theory of knowledge, or rather of nescience or no-knowledge, he
gives in _La Saisiaz_, _Ferishtah's Fancies, The Parleyings_, and
_Asolando_--in all his later and more reflective poems, in fact. It
must, I think, be held to be his deliberate and final view--and all the
more so, because, by a peculiar process, he gets from it his defence of
his ethical and religious faith.

In the first of these poems, Browning, while discussing the problem of
immortality in a purely speculative spirit, and without stipulating,
"Provided answer suits my hopes, not fears," gives a tolerably full
account of that which must be regarded as the principles of his theory
of knowledge. Its importance to his ethical doctrine justifies a
somewhat exhaustive examination of it.

He finds himself to be "a midway point, between a cause before and an
effect behind--both blanks." Within that narrow space, of the self
hemmed in by two unknowns, all experience is crammed. Out of that
experience crowds all that he knows, and all that he misknows. There
issues from experience--

"Conjecture manifold,
But, as knowledge, this comes only--things may be as I behold,
Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are;
I myself am what I know not--ignorance which proves no bar
To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can recognize
What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest--surmise.
If my fellows are or are not, what may please them and what pain,--
Mere surmise: my own experience--that is knowledge once again."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

Experience, then, within which he (and every one else) acknowledges that
all