variety of forms of being, love is the permanent element and the true essence.  Nature is on its way back to God, gathering treasure as it goes.  The static view is not true to facts; it is development that for the poet explains the nature of things; and development is the evolution of love.  Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form.  It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better.  And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself.  The universe is homeward bound.

Now, whether love is the highest principle or not, I shall not inquire at present.  My task in this chapter has been to try to show that the idea of evolution drives us onward towards some highest conception, and then uses that conception as a principle to explain all things.  If man is veritably higher as a physical organism than the bird or reptile, then biology, if it proceeds according to the principles of evolution, must seek the meaning of the latter in the former, and make the whole kingdom of life a process towards man.  “Man is no upstart in the creation.  His limbs are only a more exquisite organization—­say rather the finish—­of the rudimental forms that have already been sweeping the sea and creeping in the mud.”  And the same way of thought applies to man as a spiritual agent.  If spirit be higher than matter, and if love be spirit at its best, then the principle of evolution leaves no option to the scientific thinker, but to regard all things as potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world as manifestations of love.  Evolution necessarily combines all the objects to which it is applied into a unity.  It knits all the infinite forms of natural life into an organism of organisms, so that it is a universal life which really lives in all animate beings.  “Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher.  There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force.”  In its still wider application by poetry and philosophy, the idea of evolution gathers all being into one self-centred totality, and makes all finite existence a movement within, and a movement of, that final perfection which, although last in order of time, is first in order of potency,—­the prius of all things, the active energy in all things, and the reality of all things.  It is the doctrine of the immanence of God; and it reveals “the effort of God, of the supreme intellect, in the extreme frontier of His universe.”

In pronouncing, as Browning frequently does, that “after last comes first” and “what God once blessed cannot prove accursed”; in the boldness of the faith whereby he makes all the inferior grades of being into embodiments of the supreme good; in resolving the evils of human life, the sorrow, strife, and sin of man into means of man’s promotion, he is only applying, in a thorough manner, the principle