on which all modern speculation rests.  His conclusions may shock common-sense; and they may seem to stultify not only our observation of facts, but the testimony of our moral consciousness.  But I do not know of any principle of speculation which, when elevated into a universal principle of thought, will not do the same; and this is why the greatest poets and philosophers seem to be touched with a divine madness.  Still, if this be madness, there is a method in it.  We cannot escape from its logic, except by denying the idea of evolution—­the hypothesis by means of which modern thought aims, and in the main successfully aims, at reducing the variety of existence, and the chaos of ordinary experience, into an order-ruled world and a kosmos of articulated knowledge.

The new idea of evolution differs from that of universal causation, to which even the ignorance of our own day has learnt to submit, in this mainly—­it does not leave things on the level on which it finds them.  Both cause and evolution assert the unity of being, which, indeed, every one must assume—­even sceptics and pessimists; but development represents that unity as self-enriching; so that its true nature is revealed, only in the highest form of existence which man can conceive.  The attempt of poets and philosophers to establish a universal synthesis by means of evolution, differs from the work which is done by men of science, only in the extent of its range and the breadth of its results.  It is not “idealism,” but the scepticism which, in our day, conceals its real nature under the name of dualism or agnosticism, that is at war with the inner spirit of science.  “Not only,” we may say of Browning as it was said of Emerson by Professor Tyndall, “is his religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science; but all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates.  By him scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world.”  And this he does without any distortion of the truth.  For natural science, to one who understands its main tendency, does not militate against philosophy, art, and religion; nor threaten to overturn a metaphysic whose principle is truth, or beauty, or goodness.  Rather, it is gradually eliminating the discord of fragmentary existence, and making the harmony of the world more and more audible to mankind.  It is progressively proving that the unity, of which we are all obscurely conscious from the first, actually holds in the whole region of its survey.  The idea of evolution is reconciling science with art and religion, in an idealistic conception of the universe.

CHAPTER VIII.

BROWNING’S SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.

“Let him, therefore, who would arrive at knowledge of nature, train his moral sense, let him act and conceive in accordance with the noble essence of his soul; and, as if of herself, nature will become open to him.  Moral action is that great and only experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves."[A]

[Footnote A:  Novalis.]