ts 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_.]

In the last chapter, I tried to set forth some considerations that
justify the attempt to interpret the world by a spiritual principle. The
conception of development, which modern science and philosophy assume as
a starting-point for their investigation, was shown to imply that the
lowest forms of existence can be explained, only as stages in the
self-realization of that which is highest. This idea "levels upwards,"
and points to self-consciousness as the ultimate truth of all things. In
other words, it involves that all interpretation of the world is
anthropomorphic, in the sense that what constitutes thought constitut