Now, since the conception of development is a self-contradictory one, or, in other words, since it necessarily implies the conflict of the ideal and actual in all life, and in every instant of its history, it remains for us to determine more fully what are the warring elements in human nature.  What is the nature of this life of man, which, like all life, is self-evolving; and by conflict with what does the evolution take place?  What is the ideal which condemns the actual, and yet realizes itself by means of it; and what is the actual which wars against the ideal, and yet contains it in potency, and reaches towards it?  That human life is conceived by Browning as a moral life, and not a more refined and complex form of the natural life of plants and animals—­a view which finds its exponents in Herbert Spencer, and other so-called evolutionists—­it is scarcely necessary to assert.  It is a life which determines itself, and determines itself according to an idea of goodness.  That idea, moreover, because it is a moral ideal, must be regarded as the conception of perfect and absolute goodness.  Through the moral end, man is ideally identified with God, who, indeed, is necessarily conceived as man’s moral ideal regarded as already and eternally real.  “God” and the “moral ideal” are, in truth, expressions of the same idea; they convey the conception of perfect goodness from different standpoints.  And perfect goodness is, to Browning, limitless love.  Pleasure, wisdom, power, and even the beauty which art discovers and reveals, together with every other inner quality and outer state of being, have only relative worth.  “There is nothing either in the world or out of it which is unconditionally good, except a good will,” said Kant; and a good will, according to Browning, is a will that wills lovingly.  From love all other goodness is derived.  There is earnest meaning, and not mere sentiment, in the poet’s assertion that

  “There is no good of life but love—­but love! 
  What else looks good, is some shade flung from love. 
  Love gilds it, gives it worth.  Be warned by me,
  Never you cheat yourself one instant!  Love,
  Give love, ask only love, and leave the rest!"[A]

[Footnote A:  In a Balcony.]

“Let man’s life be true,” he adds, “and love’s the truth of mine.”  To attain this truth, that is, to constitute love into the inmost law of his being, and permanent source of all his activities, is the task of man.  And Browning defines that love as

            “Yearning to dispense,
  Each one its own amount of gain thro’ its own mode
  Of practising with life.”