"Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first:
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find mis-known;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self:
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God's gift was that man shall conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed?"[A]

[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]

"Progress," the poet says, is "man's distinctive mark alone." The
endlessness of the progress, the fact that every truth known to-day
seems misknown to-morrow, that every ideal once achieved only points to
another and becomes itself a stepping stone, does not, as in his later
days, bring despair to him. For the consciousness of failure is possible
in knowledge, as in morality, only because there has come a fuller
light. Browning does not, as yet, dwell exclusively on the negative
element in progress, or forget that it is possible only through a deeper
positive. He does not think that, because we turn our backs on what we
have gained, we are therefore not going forward; nay, he asserts the
contrary. Failure, even the failure of knowledge, is triumph's evidence
in these earlier days; and complete failure, the unchecked rule of evil
in any form, is therefore impossible. We deny