That it is to such feeling that Browning really appeals against knowledge becomes abundantly evident, when we bear in mind that he always calls it “love.”  For love in man is never ignorant.  It knows its object, and is a conscious identification of the self with it.  And to Browning, the object of love, when love is at its best—­of that love by means of which he refutes intellectual pessimism—­is mankind.  The revolt of the heart against all evil is a desire for the good of all men.  In other words, his refuge against the assailing doubts which spring from the intellect, is in the moral consciousness.  But that consciousness is no mere emotion; it is a consciousness which knows the highest good, and moves in sympathy with it.  It is our maturest wisdom; for it is the manifestation of the presence and activity of the ideal, the fullest knowledge and the surest.  Compared with this, the emotion linked to ignorance, of which the poet speaks in his philosophic theory, is a very poor thing.  It is poorer than the lowest human love.

Now, if this higher interpretation of the term “heart” be accepted, it is easily seen why its authority should seem higher than that of reason; and particularly, if it be remembered that, while the heart is thus widened to take in all direct consciousness of the ideal, “the reason” is reduced to the power of reflection, or mental analysis.  “The heart,” in this sense, is the intensest unity of the complex experiences of a whole life, while “the reason” is taken merely as a faculty which invents arguments, and provides grounds and evidences; it is what is called, in the language of German philosophy, the “understanding.”  Now, in this sense, the understanding has, at best, only a borrowed authority.  It is the faculty of rules rather than of principles.  It is ever dogmatic, assertive, repellent, hard; and it always advances its forces in single line.  Its logic never convinced any one of truth or error, unless, beneath the arguments which it advanced, there lay some deeper principle of concord.  Thus, the opposition between “faith and reason,” rightly interpreted, is that between a concrete experience, instinct with life and conviction, and a mechanical arrangement of abstract arguments.  The quarrel of the heart is not with reason, but with reasons.  “Evidences of Christianity?” said Coleridge; “I am weary of the word.”  It is this weariness of evidence, of the endless arguments pro and con, which has caused so many to distrust reason and knowledge, and which has sometimes driven believers to the dangerous expedient of making their faith dogmatic and absolute.  Nor have the opponents of “the faith” been slow to seize the opportunity thus offered them.  “From the moment that a religion solicits the aid of philosophy, its ruin is inevitable,” said Heine.  “In the attempt at defence, it prates itself into destruction.  Religion, like every absolutism, must not seek to justify itself.  Prometheus is bound to the rock by a silent force.