is not also incipient knowledge; for feeling is only
the subjective side of knowledge--that face of the known fact which is
turned inwards.

If, therefore, the poet's agnosticism were taken literally, and, in his
philosophical poems he obviously means it to be taken literally, it
would lead to a denial of the very principles of religion and morality,
which it was meant to support. His appeal to love would then, strictly
speaking, be an appeal to the love of nothing known, or knowable; and
such love is impossible. For love, if it is to be distinguished from the
organic, impulse of beast towards beast, must have an object. A mere
instinctive activity of benevolence in man, by means of which he
lightened the sorrows of his brethren, if not informed with knowledge,
would have no more moral worth than the grateful warmth of the sun. Such
love as this there may be in the animal creation. If the bird is not
rational, we may say that it builds its nest and lines it for its brood,
pines for its partner and loves it, at the bidding of the returning
spring, in much the same way as the meadows burst into flower. Without
knowledge, the whole process is merely a natural one; or, if it be more,
it is so only in so far as the life of emotion can be regarded as a
foretaste of the life of thought. But such a natural process is not
possible to man. Every activity in him is relative to his
self-consciousness, and takes a new character from that relation. His
love at the best and worst is the love of something that he knows, and
in which he seeks to find himself made rich with new sufficiency. Thus
love can not "ally" itself with ignorance. It is, indeed, an impulse
pressing for the closer communion of the lover with the object of his
love.

"Like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable;
In one another's substance finding food."[A]

[Footnote A: Shelley's _Epipsychidion_.]

But, for a being such as Browning describes, who is shut up within the
blind walls of his own self, the self-transcending impulse of love would
be impossible. If man's inner consciousness is to be conceived as a dark
room shutting out the world, upon whose shadowy phenomena the candle of
introspection throws a dim and uncertain light, then he can have no
interest outside of himself; nor can he ever take that first step in
goodness, which