e end, be obliged to
treat not only as a hypothesis--for all principles of reconciliation,
even those of the sciences, as long as knowledge is incomplete, must be
regarded as hypotheses--but also as a hypothesis which he had no right
to assume. It may be that in the end we shall be obliged to say of him,
as of so many others--

"See the sage, with the hunger for the truth,
And see his system that's all true, except
The one weak place, that's stanchioned by a lie!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]

It may be that the religious form, through which he generally reaches
his convictions, is not freed from a dogmatic element, which so
penetrates his thought as to vitiate it as a philosophy. Nevertheless,
it answered for the poet all the uses of a philosophy, and it may do the
same for many who are distrustful of the systems of the schools, and who
are "neither able to find a faith nor to do without one." It contains
far-reaching hints of a reconciliation of the elements of discord in our
lives, and a suggestion of a way in which it may be demonstrated, that
an optimistic theory is truer to facts than any scepticism or
agnosticism, with the despair that they necessarily bring.

For Browning not only advanced a principle, whereby, as he conceived,
man might again be reconciled to the world and God, and all things be
viewed as the manifestation of a power that is benevolent; he also
sought to apply his principle to the facts of life. He illustrates his
fundamental hypothesis by means of these facts; and he tests its
validity with the persistence and impressive candour of a scientific
investigator. His optimism is not that of an eclectic, who can ignore
inconvenient difficulties. It is not an attempt to justify the whole by
neglecting details, or to make wrong seem right by reference to a
far-off result, in which the steps of the process are forgotten. He
stakes the value of his view of life on its power to meet _all_ facts;
one fact, ultimately irreconcilable with his hypothesis, will, he knows,
destroy it.

"All the same,
Of absolute and irretrievable black,--black's soul of black
Beyond white's power to disintensify,--
Of that I saw no sample: such may wreck
My life and ruin my philosophy
Tomorrow, doubtless."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Bean Stripe_--_Ferishtah's Fancies_.]

He knew that, to justify God, he had to justify _all_ His ways to man;
that if the good rules a