just as goodness cannot be fully achieved in any act, till the agent is in all ways lifted to the level of absolute goodness.  Physics cannot reveal the forces which keep a stone in its place on the earth, till it has traced the forces that maintain the starry systems in their course.  No fact can be thoroughly known, i.e., known in its reality, till the light of the universe has been focussed upon it:  and, on the other hand, to know any subject through and through would be to explain all being.  The highest law and the essence of the simple fact, the universal and the particular, can only be known together, in and through one another.  “Reality” in “the least atom” will be known, only when knowledge has completed its work, and the universe has become a transparent sphere, penetrated in every direction by the shafts of intelligence.

But this is only half the truth.  If knowledge is never complete, it is always completing; if reality is never known, it is ever being known; if the ideal is never actual, it is always being actualized.  The complete failure of knowledge is as impossible as its complete success.  It is at no time severed from reality; it is never its mere adumbration, nor are its contents mere phenomena.  On the contrary, it is reality partially revealed, the ideal incompletely actualized.  Our very errors are the working of reality within us, and apart from it they would be impossible.  The process towards truth by man is the process of truth in man; the movement of knowledge towards reality is the movement of reality into knowledge.  A purely subjective consciousness which knows, such as the poet tried to describe, is a self-contradiction:  it would be a consciousness at once related, and not related, to the actual world.  But man has no need to relate himself to the world.  He is already related, and his task is to understand that relation, or, in other words, to make both its terms intelligible.  Man has no need to go out from himself to facts; his relation to facts is prior to his distinction from them.  The truth is that he cannot entirely lift himself away from them, nor suspend his thoughts in the void.  In his inmost being he is creation’s voice, and in his knowledge he confusedly murmurs its deep thoughts.

Browning was aware of this truth in its application to man’s moral nature.  In speaking of the principle of love, he was not tempted to apply fixed alternatives.  On the contrary, he detected in the “poorest love that was ever offered” the veritable presence of that which is perfect and complete, though never completely actualized.  His interest in the moral development of man, and his penetrative moral insight, acting upon, and guided by the truths of the Christian religion, warned him, on this side, against the absolute separation of the ideal and actual, the divine and human.  Human love, however poor in quality and limited in range, was to him God’s love in man.  It was a wave breaking in the individual of that First Love, which is ever flowing back through the life of humanity to its primal source.  To him all moral endeavour is the process of this Primal Love; and every man, as he consciously identifies himself with it, may use the language of Scripture, and say, “It is not I that live, but Christ lives in me.”