rs to
demonstrate a theory of knowledge, a theory of the relation of knowledge
to morality, and a theory of the nature of evil; and he discusses the
arguments for the immortality of the soul. In these poems his artistic
instinct avails him, not as in his earlier ones, for the discovery of
truth by way of intuition, but for the adornment of doctrines already
derived from a metaphysical repository. His art is no longer free, no
longer its own end, but coerced into an alien service. It has become
illustrative and argumentative, and in being made to subserve
speculative purposes, it has ceased to be creative. Browning has
appealed to philosophy, and philosophy must try his cause.

Such, then, is Browning's theory; and I need make no further apology for
discussing at some length the validity of the division which it involves
between the intellectual and the moral life of man. Is it possible to
combine the weakness of man's intelligence with the strength of his
moral and religious life, and to find in the former the condition of the
latter? Does human knowledge fail, as the poet considers it to fail? Is
the intelligence of man absolutely incapable of arriving at knowledge of
things as they are? If it does, if man cannot know the truth, can he
attain goodness? These are the questions that must now be answered.

It is one of the characteristics of recent thought that it distrusts its
own activity: the ancient philosophical "Scepticism" has been revived
and strengthened. Side by side with the sense of the triumphant progress
of natural science, there is a conviction, shared even by scientific
investigators themselves, as well as by religious teachers and by many
students of philosophy, that our knowledge has only limited and relative
value, and that it always stops short of the true nature of things. The
reason of this general conviction lies in the fact that thought has
become aware of its own activity; men realize more clearly than they did
in former times that the apparent constitution of things depends
directly on the character of the intelligence which apprehends them.

This relativity of things to thought has, not unnaturally, suggested the
idea that the objects of our knowledge are different from objects as
they are. "That the real nature of things is very different from what we
make of them, that thought and thing are divorced, that there is a
fundamental antithesis between them," is, as Hegel said, "the hinge on
which