t as to its own states, by bringing in the miraculous aid of
revelation, or by postulating an unerring moral faculty. He does not
assume an intuitive power of knowing right from wrong; but he maintains
that ignorance enwraps man's moral sense.[B]

[Footnote B: See Chapter VIII.]

And, not only are we unable to know the rule of right and wrong in
details, but we cannot know whether there _is_ right or wrong. At times
the poet seems inclined to say that evil is a phenomenon conjured up by
the frail intelligence of man.

"Man's fancy makes the fault!
Man, with the narrow mind, must cram inside
His finite God's infinitude,--earth's vault
He bids comprise the heavenly far and wide,
Since Man may claim a right to understand
What passes understanding."[A]

[Footnote A: _Bernard de Mandeville_.]

God's ways are past finding out. Nay, God Himself is unknown. At times,
indeed, the power to love within man seems to the poet to be a clue to
the nature of the Power without, and God is all but revealed in this
surpassing emotion of the human heart. But, when philosophizing, he
withdraws even this amount of knowledge. He is

"Assured that, whatsoe'er the quality
Of love's cause, save that love was caused thereby,
This--nigh upon revealment as it seemed
A minute since--defies thy longing looks,
Withdrawn into the unknowable once more."[B]

[Footnote B: _A Pillar at Sebzevar_.]

Thus--to sum up Browning's view of knowledge--we are ignorant of the
world; we do not know even whether it is good, or evil, or only their
semblance, that is presented to us in human life; and we know nothing of
God, except that He is the cause of love in man. What greater depth of
agnosticism is possible?

When the doctrine is put in this bald form, the moral and religious
consciousness of man, on behalf of which the theory was invented,
revolts against it.

Nevertheless, the distinction made by Browning between the intellectual
and emotional elements of human life is very common in religious
thought. It is not often, indeed, that either the worth of love, or the
weakness of knowledge receives such emphatic expression as that which is
given to them by the poet; but the same general idea of their relation
is often expressed, and still more often implied. Browning differs from
our ordinary teachers mainly in the boldness of his affirmatives and
negatives. They, too, regard the intellect as merely human, and the
emotion of l