Cunliffe — Browning’s Idealism. 
671 
Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, 
Unaffected by its end,—that this thing likewise needs must be; 
Call this—God, then, call that—soul, and both—the only facts for me. 
Prove them facts? That they o’erpass my power of proving, proves them 
such: 
Fact it is I know I know not something which is fact as much. 
(La Saisiaz 217-224.) 
God, the infinite, is unknowable to Man, the finite—“utterly 
incomprehensible 
none the minutest duct 
To that out-nature, naught that would instruct 
And so let rivalry begin to live: 
(Sordello u. s.) 
Man cannot really know anything; he judges solely by appear¬ 
ances : 
“To know of, think about— 
Is all man’s sum of faculty effects 
When exercised on earth’s least atom, Son ! 
What was, what is, what may such atom be ? 
No answer! Still, what seems it to man’s sense? 
An atom with some certain properties 
Known about, thought of as occasion needs, 
—Man’s—but occasions of the universe? 
Unthinkable, unknowable to man.” 
(A Bean Stripe 366-374.) 
Still less can he know the infinite, and all ideas he forms of 
God are in their degree like those of Caliban upon Setebos. 
So prays the Pope in The Ring and the Booh: 
O Thou,—as represented here to me 
In such conception as my soul allows,— 
Under Thy measureless, my atom width !— 
Man’s mind, what is it but a convex glass 
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points 
Picked out of the immensity of sky, 
To re-unite there, be our heaven for earth, 
Our known unknown, our God revealed to man ? 
Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole; 
Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,— 
There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus !) 
In the absolute immensity, the whole 
Appreciable solely by Thyself. 
(X. 1303-1315.) 
