SCIENCE AND MODERN POETRY 753 



for Browning never advanced beyond the position taken up in 

 his first really great poem, Paracelsus, which he published at the 

 age of twenty-three. It is remarkable that although this poem 

 was written a quarter of a century before Darwin's Origin was 

 published, yet it contains what is perhaps one of the most 

 precise, complete and satisfactory expressions of the principle of 

 Evolution that has ever been put forward. As far as regards his 

 position towards this theory and towards contemporary thought 

 in general, his mind was as fully developed at this time as it was 

 in any of his later poems, and his whole conception of the 

 Universe was ruled by this one idea. Thus at the close of the 

 poem, the speaker Paracelsus shows how God is immanent in 

 all Nature and how finally all leads up to man ; and yet how 

 " man is not Man as yet," but must develop into something far 

 higher and nobler. The whole poem is wonderfully conceived 

 and still more wonderfully expressed ; it is one of the wonders 

 of the English language ; one of those precious things of litera- 

 ture that humanity cannot afford to be without. It is also 

 interesting from another point of view. It shows us that 

 Browning arrived at the conception of evolution, not from 

 science alone, but from the whole of contemporary thought, 

 whereas Tennyson arrived at it mainly from the scientific side. 

 It points out to us exactly the nature of any influence that 

 science may have had on modern poetry. Science is not an 

 extraneous thing which casts a halo, like some divine effulgence, 

 over everything that comes within its influence. It is merely a 

 mode of thought. It is one of the forms in which thought 

 expresses itself. Philosophy is another, and so also to a large 

 extent are poetry and art. All these are merely expressions of 

 thought ; merely forms in which is expressed man's outlook on 

 life and on the Universe. As such they are bound to influence 

 each other, to overlap, as it were, and collectively they represent 

 that " spirit of the age " which we are so prone to objectify and 

 make the standard by which we judge and are judged, and by 

 which, to use Hegel's phrase, we " re-evaluate all values " as 

 human exigencies demand. This " spirit of the age," which 

 is thus in reality but another name for modern thought, is 

 itself a product of the human mind — like science, poetry, and 

 art — and must therefore change with progress. This brings 

 one naturally to the idea of the relativity of human knowledge 

 and the impossibility of setting up absolute standards. This 



