“Like two meteors of expanding flame,
  Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
  Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
  Burning, yet ever inconsumable;
  In one another’s substance finding food."[A]

[Footnote A:  Shelley’s Epipsychidion.]

But, for a being such as Browning describes, who is shut up within the blind walls of his own self, the self-transcending impulse of love would be impossible.  If man’s inner consciousness is to be conceived as a dark room shutting out the world, upon whose shadowy phenomena the candle of introspection throws a dim and uncertain light, then he can have no interest outside of himself; nor can he ever take that first step in goodness, which carries him beyond his narrow individuality to seek and find a larger self in others.  Morality, even in its lowest form, implies knowledge, and knowledge of something better than “those apparent other mortals.”  With the first dawn of the moral life comes the consciousness of an ideal, which is not actual; and such a break with the natural is not possible except to him who has known a better and desired it.  The ethical endeavour of man is the attempt to convert ideas into actuality; and all his activity as moral agent takes place within the sphere that is illumined by the light of knowledge.  If knowledge breaks down, there is no law of action which he can obey.  The moral law that must be apprehended, and whose authority must be recognized by man, either sinks out of being or becomes an illusive phantom, if man is doomed to ignorance or false knowledge.  To extinguish truth is to extinguish goodness.

In like manner, religion, which the poet would fain defend for man by means of agnosticism, becomes impossible, if knowledge be denied.  Religion is not blind emotion; nor can mere feeling, however ecstatic, ascend to God.  Animals feel, but they are not, and cannot be, religious—­unless they can know.  The love of God implies knowledge.  “I know Him whom I have believed” is the language of religion.  For what is religion but a conscious identification of the self with One who is known to fulfil its needs and satisfy its aspirations?  Agnosticism is thus directly destructive of it.  We cannot, indeed, prove God as the conclusion of a syllogism, for He is the primary hypothesis of all proof.  But, nevertheless, we cannot reach Him without knowledge.  Emotion reveals no object, but is consequent upon the revelation of it; feeling yields no truth, but is the witness of the worth of a truth for the individual.  If man were shut up to mere feeling, even the awe of the devout agnostic would be impossible.  For the Unknowable cannot generate any emotion.  It appears to do so, only because the Unknowable of the agnostic is not altogether unknown to him; but is a vast, abysmal “Something,” that has occupied with its shadowy presence the field of his imagination.  It is paganism stricken with the plague, and philosophy afflicted with blindness,