in process of actualization, then no fixed distinctions made with reference to him can be true.  If, for instance, it be asked whether man is rational or irrational, free or bound, good or evil, God or brute, the true answer, if he is veritably a being moving from ignorance to knowledge, from wickedness to virtue, from bondage to freedom, is, that he is at once neither of these alternatives and both.  All hard terms of division, when applied to a subject which grows, are untrue.  If the life of man is a self-enriching process, if he is becoming good, and rational, and free, then at no point in the movement is it possible to pass fixed and definite judgments upon him.  He must be estimated by his direction and momentum, by the whence and whither of his life.  There is a sense in which man is from the first and always good, rational and free; for it is only by the exercise of reason and freedom that he exists as man.  But there is also a sense in which he is none of these; for he is at the first only a potency not yet actualized.  He is not rational, but becoming rational; not good, but becoming good; not free, but aspiring towards freedom.  It is his prayer that “in His light, he may see light truly, and in His service find perfect freedom.”

In this frank assumption of the point of view of development.  Browning suggests the question whether the endless debate regarding freedom, and necessity, and other moral terms, may not spring from the fact, that both of the opposing schools of ethics are fundamentally unfaithful to the subject of their inquiry.  They are treating a developing reality from an abstract point of view, and taking for granted,—­what cannot be true of man, if he grows in intellectual power and moral goodness—­that he is either good or evil, either rational or irrational, either free or bond, at every moment in the process.  They are treating man from a static, instead of from a kinetic point of view, and forgetting that it is his business to acquire the moral and intellectual freedom, which he has potentially from the first—­

            “Some fitter way express
  Heart’s satisfaction that the Past indeed
  Is past, gives way before Life’s best and last,
  The all-including Future!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Gerard de Lairesse.]

But, whether or not the new point of view renders some of the old disputations of ethics meaningless, it is certain that Browning viewed moral life as a growth through conflict.

            “What were life
  Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife
  Through the ambiguous Present to the goal
  Of some all-reconciling Future?"[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

To become, to develop, to actualize by reaction against the natural and moral environment, is the meaning both of the self and of the world it works upon.  “We are here to learn the good of peace through strife, of love through hate, and reach knowledge by ignorance.”