[Footnote A:  Fifine at the Fair, lv.]

In this passage, Browning gives expression to an idea which continually reappears in his pages—­that human life, in its essence, is movement to moral goodness through opposition.  His fundamental conception of the human spirit is that it is a process, and not a fixed fact.  “Man,” he says, “was made to grow not stop.”

“Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self."[B]

[Footnote B:  A Death in the Desert.]

             “By such confession straight he falls
  Into man’s place, a thing nor God nor beast,
  Made to know that he can know and not more: 
  Lower than God who knows all and can all,
  Higher than beasts which know and can so far
  As each beast’s limit, perfect to an end,
  Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more;
  While man knows partly but conceives beside,
  Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
  And in this striving, this converting air
  Into a solid he may grasp and use,
  Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
  Not God’s and not the beasts’:  God is, they are,
  Man partly is and wholly hopes to be."[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid.]

It were easy to multiply passages which show that his ultimate deliverance regarding man is, not that he is, nor that he is not, but that he is ever becoming.  Man is ever at the point of contradiction between the actual and ideal, and moving from the latter to the former.  Strife constitutes him.  He is a war of elements; “hurled from change to change unceasingly.”  But rest is death; for it is the cessation of the spiritual activity, whose essence is acquirement, not mere possession, whether in knowledge or in goodness.

            “Man must pass from old to new,
  From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
  From what once seemed good, to what now proves best."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Death in the Desert.]

Were the movement to stop, and the contradiction between the actual and ideal reconciled, man would leave man’s estate, and pass under “angel’s law.”

“Indulging every instinct of the soul
There, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

But as long as he is man, he has

  “Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become.”

In Paracelsus, Fifine at the Fair, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and many of his other poems, Browning deals with the problem of human life from the point of view of development.  And it is this point of view, consistently held, which enables him to throw a new light on the whole subject of ethics.  For, if man be veritably a being in process of evolution, if he be a permanent that always changes from earliest childhood to old age, if he be a living thing, a potency