The one condition
of leading a full life, of maintaining a living relation between
ourselves and both the spiritual and material elements of our existence,
is to make our lives an alternating rhythm of the head and heart, to
distinguish with absolute clearness between the realm of reason and that
of faith.

Now, such an assumption would be fatal to any attempt like the present,
to find truth in poetry; and I must, therefore, try to meet it before
entering upon a statement and criticism of Browning's view of life. I
cannot admit that the difficulties of placing the facts of man's
spiritual life on a rational basis are so great as to justify the
assertion that there is no such basis, or that it is not discoverable by
man. Surely, it is unreasonable to make intellectual death the condition
of spiritual life. If such a condition were imposed on man, it must
inevitably defeat its own purpose; for man cannot possibly continue to
live a divided life, and persist in believing that for which his reason
knows no defence. We must, in the long run, either rationalize our faith
in morality and religion, or abandon them as illusions. And we should at
least hesitate to deny that reason--in spite of its apparent failure in
the past to justify our faith in the principles of spiritual life--may
yet, as it becomes aware of its own nature and the might which dwells in
it, find beauty and goodness, nay, God himself, in the world. We should
at least hesitate to condemn man to choose between irreflective
ignorance and irreligion, or to lock the intellect and the highest
emotions of our nature and principles of our life, in a mortal struggle.
Poetry and religion may, after all, be truer then prose, and have
something to tell the world that science, which is often ignorant of its
own limits, cannot teach.

The failure of philosophy in the past, even if it were as complete as is
believed by persons ignorant of its history, is no argument against its
success in the future. Such persons have never known that the world of
thought like that of action makes a stepping stone of its dead self. He
who presumes to decide what passes the power of man's thought, or to
prescribe absolute limits to human knowledge, is rash, to say the least;
and he has neither caught the most important of the lessons of modern
science, nor been lifted to the level of its inspiration. For science
has done one thing greater than to unlock the secrets of nature. It has
revea