No final estimate of the value of this theory of morals and religion can be made, without examining its philosophical presuppositions.  Nor is such an examination in any way unfair; for it is obvious that Browning explicitly offers us a philosophical doctrine.  He appeals to argument and not to artistic intuition; he offers a definite theory to which he claims attention, not on account of any poetic beauty that may lie within it, but on the ground that it is a true exposition of the moral nature of man.  Kant’s Metaphysic of Ethics is not more metaphysical in intention than the poet’s later utterances on the problems of morality.  In La Saisiaz, in Ferishtah’s Fancies, in the Parleyings, and, though less explicitly, in Asolando, Fifine at the Fair, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, Browning definitely states, and endeavours to demonstrate a theory of knowledge, a theory of the relation of knowledge to morality, and a theory of the nature of evil; and he discusses the arguments for the immortality of the soul.  In these poems his artistic instinct avails him, not as in his earlier ones, for the discovery of truth by way of intuition, but for the adornment of doctrines already derived from a metaphysical repository.  His art is no longer free, no longer its own end, but coerced into an alien service.  It has become illustrative and argumentative, and in being made to subserve speculative purposes, it has ceased to be creative.  Browning has appealed to philosophy, and philosophy must try his cause.

Such, then, is Browning’s theory; and I need make no further apology for discussing at some length the validity of the division which it involves between the intellectual and the moral life of man.  Is it possible to combine the weakness of man’s intelligence with the strength of his moral and religious life, and to find in the former the condition of the latter?  Does human knowledge fail, as the poet considers it to fail?  Is the intelligence of man absolutely incapable of arriving at knowledge of things as they are?  If it does, if man cannot know the truth, can he attain goodness?  These are the questions that must now be answered.

It is one of the characteristics of recent thought that it distrusts its own activity:  the ancient philosophical “Scepticism” has been revived and strengthened.  Side by side with the sense of the triumphant progress of natural science, there is a conviction, shared even by scientific investigators themselves, as well as by religious teachers and by many students of philosophy, that our knowledge has only limited and relative value, and that it always stops short of the true nature of things.  The reason of this general conviction lies in the fact that thought has become aware of its own activity; men realize more clearly than they did in former times that the apparent constitution of things depends directly on the character of the intelligence which apprehends them.