[Footnote A:  A Bean-Stripe.  See also La Saisiaz.]

Nor does Browning endeavour to correct this limited testimony of the intellect as to its own states, by bringing in the miraculous aid of revelation, or by postulating an unerring moral faculty.  He does not assume an intuitive power of knowing right from wrong; but he maintains that ignorance enwraps man’s moral sense.[B]

[Footnote B:  See Chapter VIII.]

And, not only are we unable to know the rule of right and wrong in details, but we cannot know whether there is right or wrong.  At times the poet seems inclined to say that evil is a phenomenon conjured up by the frail intelligence of man.

    “Man’s fancy makes the fault! 
  Man, with the narrow mind, must cram inside
  His finite God’s infinitude,—­earth’s vault
  He bids comprise the heavenly far and wide,
  Since Man may claim a right to understand
  What passes understanding."[A]

[Footnote A:  Bernard de Mandeville.]

God’s ways are past finding out.  Nay, God Himself is unknown.  At times, indeed, the power to love within man seems to the poet to be a clue to the nature of the Power without, and God is all but revealed in this surpassing emotion of the human heart.  But, when philosophizing, he withdraws even this amount of knowledge.  He is

  “Assured that, whatsoe’er the quality
  Of love’s cause, save that love was caused thereby,
  This—­nigh upon revealment as it seemed
  A minute since—­defies thy longing looks,
  Withdrawn into the unknowable once more."[B]

[Footnote B:  A Pillar at Sebzevar.]

Thus—­to sum up Browning’s view of knowledge—­we are ignorant of the world; we do not know even whether it is good, or evil, or only their semblance, that is presented to us in human life; and we know nothing of God, except that He is the cause of love in man.  What greater depth of agnosticism is possible?

When the doctrine is put in this bald form, the moral and religious consciousness of man, on behalf of which the theory was invented, revolts against it.

Nevertheless, the distinction made by Browning between the intellectual and emotional elements of human life is very common in religious thought.  It is not often, indeed, that either the worth of love, or the weakness of knowledge receives such emphatic expression as that which is given to them by the poet; but the same general idea of their relation is often expressed, and still more often implied.  Browning differs from our ordinary teachers mainly in the boldness of his affirmatives and negatives.  They, too, regard the intellect as merely human, and the emotion of love as divine.  They, too, shrink from identifying the reason of man with the reason of God; even though they may recognize that morality and religion must postulate some kind of unity between God and man.  They, too, conceive that human knowledge differs in