s help it purloins from the knowledge which it condemns.

That it is to such feeling that Browning really appeals against
knowledge becomes abundantly evident, when we bear in mind that he
always calls it "love." For love in man is never ignorant. It knows its
object, and is a conscious identification of the self with it. And to
Browning, the object of love, when love is at its best--of that love by
means of which he refutes intellectual pessimism--is mankind. The revolt
of the heart against all evil is a desire for the good of all men. In
other words, his refuge against the assailing doubts which spring from
the intellect, is in the moral consciousness. But that consciousness is
no mere emotion; it is a consciousness which knows the highest good, and
moves in sympathy with it. It is our maturest wisdom; for it is the
manifestation of the presence and activity of the ideal, the fullest
knowledge and the surest. Compared with this, the emotion linked to
ignorance, of which the poet speaks in his philosophic theory, is a very
poor thing. It is poorer than the lowest human love.

Now, if this higher interpretation of the term "heart" be accepted, it
is easily seen why its authority should seem higher than that of reason;
and particularly, if it be remembered that, while the heart is thus
widened to take in all direct consciousness of the ideal, "the reason"
is reduced to the power of reflection, or mental analysis. "The heart,"
in this sense, is the intensest unity of the complex experiences of a
whole life, while "the reason" is taken merely as a faculty which
invents arguments, and provides grounds and evidences; it is what is
called, in the language of German philosophy, the "understanding." Now,
in this sense, the understanding has, at best, only a borrowed
authority. It is the faculty of rules rather than of principles. It is
ever dogmatic, assertive, repellent, hard; and it always advances its
forces in single line. Its logic never convinced any one of truth or
error, unless, beneath the arguments which it advanced, there lay some
deeper principle of concord. Thus, the opposition between "faith and
reason," rightly interpreted, is that between a concrete experience,
instinct with life and conviction, and a mechanical arrangement of
abstract arguments. The quarrel of the heart is not with reason, but
with reasons. "Evidences of Christianity?" said Coleridge; "I am weary
of the word." It is this weariness of evidence,