So there is progress of all things to man, and all created things before his coming have—­in beauty, in power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of love and trust in the animals—­had prophecies of him which man has realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing the higher race, till man appeared at last, and one stage of being was complete.  But the law of progress does not cease now man has come.  None of his faculties are perfect.  They also by their imperfection suggest a further life, in which as all that was unfinished in the animals suggested man, so also that which is unfinished in us suggests ourselves in higher place and form.  Man’s self is not yet Man.

We learn this not only from our own boundless desires for higher life, and from our sense of imperfection.  We learn it also when we look back on the whole of nature that was before we were.  We illustrate and illuminate all that has been.  Nature is humanised, spiritualised by us.  We have imprinted ourselves on all things; and this, as we realise it, as we give thought and passion to lifeless nature, makes us understand how great we are, and how much greater we are bound to be.  We are the end of nature but not the end of ourselves.  We learn the same truth when among us the few men of genius appear; stars in the darkness.  We do not say—­These stand alone; we never can become as they.  On the contrary, we cry:  All are to be what these are, and more.  They longed for more, and we and they shall have it.  All shall be perfected; and then, and not till then, begins the new age and the new life, new progress and new joy.  This is the ultimate truth.

“And as in inferior creatures there were prognostics of man—­and here Browning repeats himself—­so in man there are prognostics of the future and loftier humanity.

    August anticipations, symbols, types
    Of a dim splendour ever on before
    In that eternal cycle life pursues. 
    For men begin to pass their nature’s bound—­

ceaselessly outgrowing themselves in history, and in the individual life—­and some, passionately aspiring, run ahead of even the general tendency, and conceive the very highest, and live to reveal it, and in revealing it lift and save those who do not conceive it.

“I, Paracelsus,” he cries—­and now Browning repeats the whole argument of the poem—­“was one of these.  To do this I vowed myself, soul and limb.

“But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path, led away by pride.  I gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone.  This I thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done.  I rejected all the past.  I despised it as a record of weakness and disgrace.  Man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring him to maturity.  He has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one leap.