Now, if this view of the poet be taken in the strict sense in which he uses it in this argument, it admits of a very easy refutation.  It takes us beyond the bounds of all possible human experience, into an imaginary region, as to which all assertions are equally valueless.  It is impossible to conceive how the conduct of a being who is moral would be affected by absolute knowledge; or, indeed, to conceive the existence of such a being.  For morality, as the poet insists, is a process in which an ideal is gradually realized through conflict with the actual—­an actual which it both produces and transmutes at every stage of the progress.  But complete knowledge would be above all process.  Hence we would have, on Browning’s hypothesis, to conceive of a being in whom perfect knowledge was combined with an undeveloped will.  A being so constituted would be an agglomerate of utterly disparate elements, the interaction of which in a single character it would be impossible to make intelligible.

But, setting aside this point, there is a curious flaw in Browning’s argument, which indicates that he had not distinguished between two forms of optimism which are essentially different from each other,—­namely, the pantheistic and the Christian.

To know that evil is only apparent, that pain is only pleasure’s mask, that all forms of wickedness and misery are only illusions of an incomplete intelligence, would, he argues, arrest all moral action and stultify love.  For love—­which necessarily implies need in its object—­is the principle of all right action.  In this he argues justly, for the moral life is essentially a conflict and progress; and, in a world in which “white ruled unchecked along the line,” there would be neither the need of conflict nor the possibility of progress.  And, on the other hand, if the good were merely a phantom, and evil the reality, the same destruction of moral activity would follow.  “White may not triumph,” in this absolute manner, nor may we “clean abolish, once and evermore, white’s faintest trace.”  There must be “the constant shade cast on life’s shine.”

All this is true; but the admission of it in no way militates against the conception of absolutely valid knowledge; nor is it any proof that we need live in the twilight of perpetual doubt, in order to be moral.  For the knowledge, of which Browning speaks, would be knowledge of a state of things in which morality would be really impossible; that is, it would be knowledge of a world in which all was evil or all was good.  On the other hand, valid knowledge of a world in which good and evil are in conflict, and in which the former is realized through victory over the latter, would not destroy morality.  What is inconsistent with the moral life is the conception of a world where there is no movement from evil to good, no evolution of character, but merely the stand-still life of “Rephan.”  But absolutely certain knowledge that the good is at