In the last chapter, I tried to set forth some considerations that justify the attempt to interpret the world by a spiritual principle.  The conception of development, which modern science and philosophy assume as a starting-point for their investigation, was shown to imply that the lowest forms of existence can be explained, only as stages in the self-realization of that which is highest.  This idea “levels upwards,” and points to self-consciousness as the ultimate truth of all things.  In other words, it involves that all interpretation of the world is anthropomorphic, in the sense that what constitutes thought constitutes things, and, therefore, that the key to nature is man.

In propounding this theory of love, and establishing an idealism, Browning is in agreement with the latest achievement of modern thought.  For, if the principle of evolution be granted, love is a far more adequate hypothesis for the explanation of the nature of things, than any purely physical principle.  Nay, science itself, in so far as it presupposes evolution, tends towards an idealism of this type.  Whether love be the best expression for that highest principle, which is conceived as the truth of being, and whether Browning’s treatment of it is consistent and valid, I do not as yet inquire.  Before attempting that task, it must be seen to what extent, and in what way, he applies the hypothesis of universal love to the particular facts of life.  For the present, I take it as admitted that the hypothesis is legitimate, as an hypothesis; it remains to ask, with what success, if any, we may hope, by its means, to solve the contradictions of life, and to gather its conflicting phenomena into the unity of an intelligible system.  This task cannot be accomplished within our limits, except in a very partial manner.  I can attempt to meet only a few of the more evident and pressing difficulties that present themselves, and I can do that only in a very general way.

The first of these difficulties, or, rather, the main difficulty from which all others spring, is that the hypothesis of universal love is incompatible with the existence of any kind of evil, whether natural or moral.  Of this, Browning was well aware.  He knew that he had brought upon himself the hard task of showing that pain, weakness, ignorance, failure, doubt, death, misery, and vice, in all their complex forms, can find their legitimate place in a scheme of love.  And there is nothing more admirable in his attitude, or more inspiring in his teaching, than the manly frankness with which he endeavours to confront the manifold miseries of human life, and to constrain them to yield, as their ultimate meaning and reality, some spark of good.