Cunliffe — Browning’s Idealism. 
675 
It is in Browning’s view, a necessary condition of life as we 
know it that future existence should be an assumption—not 
knowledge. If it were knowledge, human life would be quite 
different from what we find it. In the dialogue between Fancy 
and Reason, he assumes for the purposes of argument that a 
future life is known and certain; and from this assumption he 
draws consequences which are irreconcilable with experience. 
So he returns to his first position that the only known facts are 
God and the soul; the future life is not known fact, but mere 
surmise. 
So, I hope—no more than hope, but hope—no less than hope, 
because 
I can fathom, by no plumb-line sunk in life’s apparent laws, 
How I may in any instance fix where change should meetly fall 
Nor involve, by one revisal, abrogation of them all: 
—Which again involves as utter change in life thus law-released, 
Whence the good of goodness vanished when the ill of evil 
ceased. 
Whereas, life and laws apparent re-instated—all we know, 
All we know not,—o’er our heaven again cloud closes, until, lo— 
Hope the arrowy, just as ^constant, comes to pierce its gloom, 
compelled 
By a power and by a purpose which, if no one else beheld, 
I behold in life, so—hope. 
( 535 - 545 ) 
It is curious that this view should be regarded by Mrs. Orr as 
irreconcilable with orthodox Christianity, for it seems to be 
almost an echo of the Epistle to the Romans VIII. 24: “We 
are saved by hope; but hope that is seen, is not hope: for what 
a man seeeth, why doth he yet hope for V 9 
As to the nature and extent of the future life, Browning 
gives only scattered hints of his views, and it may be doubted 
whether his characteristic agnosticism would allow us to re¬ 
gard what he has said as more than speculation. Bordello 
once more, gives us the first clue. The conditions of the next 
life may be entirely different, not only as to sorrow and joy, 
but as to virtue and vice, with some new bond in place of flesh 
(VI. 467-484), for some bond he suggests, both in this passage 
and in 560, there will be. Evelyn Hope also implies a succes¬ 
sion of worlds, though one must not push a poetic fancy too hard. 
In Old Pictures in Florence the fancy of “life after life in un~ 
