Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher | Page 9

of its inspiration. For science has
done one thing greater than to unlock the secrets of nature. It has
revealed something of the might of reason, and given new grounds for
the faith, which in all ages has inspired the effort to know,--the faith
that the world is an intelligible structure, meant to be penetrated by the
thought of man. Can it be that nature is an "open secret," but that man,
and he alone, must remain an enigma? Or does he not rather bear
within himself the key to every problem which he solves, and is it not
his thought which penetrates the secrets of nature? The success of
science, in reducing to law the most varied and apparently unconnected

facts, should dispel any suspicion which attaches to the attempt to
gather these laws under still wider ones, and to interpret the world in
the light of the highest principles. And this is precisely what poetry and
religion and philosophy do, each in its own way. They carry the work
of the sciences into wider regions, and that, as I shall try to show, by
methods which, in spite of many external differences, are
fundamentally at one with those which the sciences employ.
There is only one way of giving the quietus to the metaphysics of poets
and philosophers, and of showing the futility of a philosophy of life, or
of any scientific explanation of religion and morals. It is to show that
there is some radical absurdity in the very attempt. Till this is done, the
human mind will not give up problems of weighty import, however
hard it may be to solve them. The world refused to believe Socrates
when he pronounced a science of nature impossible, and centuries of
failure did not break man's courage. Science, it is true, has given up
some problems as insoluble; it will not now try to construct a
perpetually moving machine, or to square the circle. But it has given
them up, not because they are difficult, but because they are
unreasonable tasks. The problems have a surd or irrational element in
them; and to solve them would be to bring reason into collision with
itself.
Now, whatever may be the difficulties of establishing a theory of life,
or a philosophy, it has never been shown to be an unreasonable task to
attempt it. One might, on the contrary, expect, prima facie, that in a
world progressively proved to be intelligible to man, man himself
would be no exception. It is impossible that the "light in him should be
darkness," or that the thought which reveals the order of the world
should be itself chaotic.
The need for philosophy is just the ultimate form of the need for
knowledge; and the truths which philosophy brings to light are implied
in every rational explanation of things. The only choice we can have is
between a conscious metaphysics and an unconscious one, between
hypotheses which we have examined and whose limitations we know,
and hypotheses which rule us from behind, as pure prejudices do. It is

because of this that the empiric is so dogmatic, and the ignorant man so
certain of the truth of his opinion. They do not know their postulates,
nor are they aware that there is no interpretation of an object which
does not finally point to a theory of being. We understand no joint or
ligament, except in relation to the whole organism, and no fact, or
event, except by finding a place for it in the context of our experience.
The history of the pebble can be given, only in the light of the story of
the earth, as it is told by the whole of geology. We must begin very far
back, and bring our widest principles to bear upon the particular thing,
if we wish really to know what it is. It is a law that explains, and laws
are always universal. All our knowledge, even the most broken and
inconsistent, streams from some fundamental conception, in virtue of
which all the variety of objects constitute one world, one orderly
kosmos, even to the meanest mind. It is true that the central thought, be
it rich or poor, must, like the sun's light, be broken against particular
facts. But there is no need of forgetting the real source of knowledge, or
of deeming that its progress is a synthesis without law, or an addition of
fact to fact without any guiding principles.
Now, it is the characteristic of poetry and philosophy that they keep
alive our consciousness of these primary, uniting principles. They
always dwell in the presence of the idea which makes their object one.
To them the world is always, and necessarily, a harmonious whole, as it
is also to the religious spirit. It