he value of
imagination as supplement to and interpreter of fact. Its partial,
tentative, and yet efficient illumining of the dark places of life is
vividly illustrated by Apollo: and he only changes his imagery when he
speaks of Reason as doing the same work. It is the imaginative, not the
scientific "reason" which Mr. Browning invokes as help in the
perplexities of experience;[122] as it is the spiritual, and not
scientific "experience" on which, in the subsequent discussions, he will
so emphatically take his stand.[123]

In the first "parleying" Mr. Browning invokes the wisdom of BERNARD DE
MANDEVILLE on certain problems of life: mainly those of the existence of
evil and the limitations of human knowledge; and the optimistic views in
which he believes Dr. Mandeville to concur with him are brought to bear
on the more gloomy philosophy of Carlyle, some well-known utterances of
whom are brought forward for confutation. The chief points of the
argument are as follows:--

Carlyle complains that God never intervenes to check the tyranny of
evil, so that it not only prevails in the present life, but for any sure
indications which exist to the contrary may still do so in the life to
come. It would be something, he thinks, if even triumphant wrong were
checked, although (here we must read between the lines) this would be
tantamount to the condoning of evil in all its less developed forms;
better still if he who has the power to do so habitually crushed it at
the birth.

Mr. Browning (alias Mandeville) replies by the parable of a garden in
which beneficent and noxious plants grow side by side. "You must
either," he declares, "admit--which you do not--that both good and evil
were chance sown, or refer their joint presence to some necessary or
pre-ordained connection between them. In the latter case you may use
your judgment in pruning away the too great exuberance of the noxious
plant, but if you destroy it once for all, you have frustrated the
intentions of him who placed it there."

Carlyle reminds his opponent of that other parable, according to which
it was an enemy who surreptitiously sowed the tares of evil, and these
grow because no one can pull them out. Divine power and foresight are,
in his opinion, incompatible with either theory, and both of these
mistaken efforts on man's part to "cram" the infinite within the limits
of his own mind and understand what passes understanding. He deprecates
the folly of linking