224 IGNORANCE AND FAITH life on Agnosticism. Professor Jones, in his learned and valuable work Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher, devotes many pages of his book to establish this antagonism of the poet to science. Browning's doctrine of evil seems to prove that he rejects the testimony of the head in favour of that of the heart; that "God has not held even ignorance to be too great a price for man to pay for goodness," that "knowledge is not the fit atmosphere for morality. It is faith and not reason, hope and trust but not certainty, that lend vigour to the good life. The heart may trust, and must trust, if it faithfully listens to its own natural voice; but reason must not demonstrate. Ignorance on the side of intellect, faith on the side of the emotions; distrust of knowledge, absolute confidence in love; such is the condition of man's highest welfare; it is only then that the purpose of his life, and of the world which is his instrument, can be achieved" (p. 273). Browning is charged with teaching that it is "impossible to reestablish faith in God, except by turning his back on knowledge." Mr. Jones declares that "Browning appeals in defence of his optimistic faith from the intellect to the heart. His theory rests on three main assumptions, namely-(1) that knowledge of the true nature of things is impossible to man, and that, therefore, it is necessary to find other and better evidence than BROWNING AND AGNOSTICISM 225 the intellect can give for the victory of good over evil; (2) that the failure of knowledge is a necessary condition of the moral life, inasmuch as certain knowledge would render all moral effort futile or needless; (3) that after the failure of knowledge there still remains possible a faith of the heart, which can furnish a sufficient objective basis to morality and religion" (p. 308). The writer grounds on this evidence a charge of "Agnosticism" against Browning, "antagonism to the intellect and distrust of its deliverances." Surely the use of the term "Agnosticism" in this connection is both new and inappropriate. Browning has done no more than the greatest thinkers from ancient times to the present, who have told us that by searching man cannot find out God. Seeking knowledge has always been held to be like wandering in a labyrinth, the farther we go the farther we are from the end. Byron truly said "Science is but an interchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance." And Emerson expressed the same truth when he said-"Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know." Browning certainly invites us to faith, but "faith does not supplant but supplements reason." He does not disparage knowledge when he points out its limitations. As well argue that the anatomist and physiologist disparage the powers of man Q 226 SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE when they tell us that we are not constituted like birds for flying in the air or like fish for living under water. Browning protests against the notion that "Man, with the narrow mind, must cram inside His finite God's infinitude. . . . Since Man may claim a right to understand Man cannot explain his own mind. It is all very well to spell the unknowable with a capital U, and then call sensation, emotion, and thought "modes of the Unknowable" as Mr. Herbert Spencer does, but this is not "golden knowledge," but what Browning terms “lacquered ignorance." No doubt it is vastly comforting to a young scientist to settle the difficulty that way, but it is no better after all than the comfort the old lady obtained from "that blessed word Mesopotamia." Browning was not to be taken in by that sort of wisdom. He knew "That becoming wise meant making slow and sure advance From a knowledge proved in error to acknowledged ignorance." 3 Man buys knowledge only to discover that his purchase is absolute nescience. In a sense this 1 Parleyings with Bernard de Mandeville. 2 Ferishtah's Fancies: "A Pillar at Sebzevah." 3 La Saisiaz. 4 Parleyings with Charles Avison. THE UNTHINKABLE ATOMS 227 may, of course, be called Agnosticism, but it is not what is usually meant by the term. Let us test it by an example or two. Brown ing says "To know of, think about— Is all man's sum of faculty effects When exercised on earth's least atom, Son! Known about, thought of as occasion needs, Marvels are told us about the atoms, marvels as great as any which Christianity asks us to accept, and so far as our faculties are concerned, not less difficult to demonstrate. "The atom, as some represent it, is no longer an infrangible mass in solid singleness,' as Lucretius described it, and as Newton conceived it, but a ring like the smoke-rings which rise from a locomotive, or from the discharge of a cannon. This ring moves as a whole; at the same time its minute parts revolve at right angles around the circular line constituting the nucleus of the ring, and are indissolubly tied down to their circular paths, and can never quit them. The rings can move and change their form without the connection of the constituent parts ever being broken. Thus in every pebble, 1 Ferishtah's Fancies: "A Bean-Stripe.' 228 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE in every visible bit of matter, are millions of these indissoluble systems of vortex-atoms as complicated as the solar system, in which each part revolves in its orbit. And since the vortexatom itself is inconceivably small, what are its parts, measuring their little years by revolving for ever within it, atoms of an atom, atoms to which the vortex-atom itself is as a universe?" 1 Again, Browning says "To think and know fire through and through Exceeds man." 2 "Fire is in the flint," "The sun Holds earthly substance somehow fire pervades The sun is inconceivable by man, who cannot even understand himself, and yet we boast of our science. Let us see what science is, and what are its limitations. "In each case that which science finds as the essential reality of matter and energy, is that which is imperceptible by sense. The essential reality of the tangible is the intangible; of the audible is the inaudible; of the visible is the invisible; of the divisible is the indivisible; of the perceptible is the imperceptible. Then 1 Professor Harris, The Philosophical Basis of Theism, p. 417. 2 Ferishtah's Fancies: "A Bean-Stripe.' Ibid.: "The Sun." |