unable to maintain it, except at the expense of degrading man’s knowledge.  Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon ignorance.  If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a Spinozist, on God’s communication of His own substance to man; on the side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray expressions which break through his deliberate theory.  While “love gains God at first leap,”

            “Knowledge means
  Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
  That victory is somehow still to reach."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Pillar at Sebzevar.]

A radical flaw runs through our knowing faculty.  Human knowledge is not only incomplete—­no one can be so foolish as to deny that—­but it is, as regarded by Browning, essentially inadequate to the nature of fact, and we must “distrust it, even when it seems demonstrable.”  No professed agnostic can condemn the human intellect more utterly than he does.  He pushes the limitedness of human knowledge into a disqualification of it to reach truth at all; and makes the conditions according to which we know, or seem to know, into a deceiving necessity, which makes us know wrongly.

            “To know of, think about,—­
  Is all man’s sum of faculty effects
  When exercised on earth’s least atom, Son! 
  What was, what is, what may such atom be? 
  No answer!"[B]

[Footnote B:  A Bean-Stripe.]

Thought plays around facts, but never reaches them.  Mind intervenes between itself and its objects, and throws its own shadow upon them; nor can it penetrate through that shadow, but deals with it as if it were reality, though it knows all the time that it is not.

This theory of knowledge, or rather of nescience or no-knowledge, he gives in La Saisiaz, Ferishtah’s Fancies, The Parleyings, and Asolando—­in all his later and more reflective poems, in fact.  It must, I think, be held to be his deliberate and final view—­and all the more so, because, by a peculiar process, he gets from it his defence of his ethical and religious faith.

In the first of these poems, Browning, while discussing the problem of immortality in a purely speculative spirit, and without stipulating, “Provided answer suits my hopes, not fears,” gives a tolerably full account of that which must be regarded as the principles of his theory of knowledge.  Its importance to his ethical doctrine justifies a somewhat exhaustive examination of it.

He finds himself to be “a midway point, between a cause before and an effect behind—­both blanks.”  Within that narrow space, of the self hemmed in by two unknowns, all experience is crammed.  Out of that experience crowds all that he knows, and all that he misknows.  There issues from experience—­