So high is the dignity and worth of the moral life to Browning, that no sacrifice is too great to secure it.  And, indeed, if it were once clearly recognized that there is no good thing but goodness, nothing of supreme worth, except the realization of a loving will, then doubt, ignorance, and every other form of apparent evil would be fully justified—­provided they were conditions whereby this highest good is attained.  And, to Browning, ignorance was one of the conditions.  And consequently, the dread pause in the music which agnosticism brings, is only “silence implying sound”; and the vain cry for truth, arising from the heart of the earth’s best men, is only a discord moving towards resolution into a more rapturous harmony.

I do not stay here to inquire whether sure knowledge would really have this disastrous effect of destroying morality, or whether its failure does not rather imply the impossibility of a moral life.  I return to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter, and which it is now possible to answer.  That question was:  How does Browning reconcile his hypothesis of universal love with the natural and moral evils existing in the world?

His answer is quite explicit.  The poet solves the problem by casting doubt upon the facts which threaten his hypothesis.  He reduces them into phenomena, in the sense of phantoms begotten by the human intellect upon unknown and unknowable realities.

  “Thus much at least is clearly understood—­
  Of power does Man possess no particle: 
  Of knowledge—­just so much as shows that still
  It ends in ignorance on every side."[A]

[Footnote A:  Francis Furini.]

He is aware of the phenomena of his own consciousness,

“My soul, and my soul’s home,
This body “;

but he knows not whether “things outside are fact or feigning.”  And he heeds little, for in either case they

            “Teach
  What good is and what evil,—­just the same,
  Be feigning or be fact the teacher."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

It is the mixture, or rather the apparent mixture, of shade and light in life, the conflict of seeming good with seeming evil in the world, that constitutes the world a probation-place.  It is a kind of moral gymnasium, crowded with phantoms, wherein by exercise man makes moral muscle.  And the vigour of the athlete’s struggle is not in the least abated by the consciousness that all he deals with are phantoms.

 “I have lived, then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught
  This—­there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught,
  Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim,
  If—­(to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!)—­
  If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil’s place,
  And life, time—­with all their chances, changes,—­just probation-space,
  Mine, for me."[A]