man--compassion, pity, forgiveness patience. We have seen that Shelley
shares this view, "for none knew good from evil"; and Blake expresses
himself very strongly about it, and complains that Plato "knew nothing
but the virtues and vices, the good and evil.... There is nothing in all
that.... Everything is good in God's eyes." Mysticism is always a
reconcilement of opposites; and this, as we have seen in connection with
science and religion, knowledge and love, is a dominant note of
Browning's philosophy. He brings it out most startlingly perhaps in _The
Statue and the Bust_, where he shows that in his very capacity for
vice, a man proves his capacity for virtue, and that a failure of energy
in the one implies a corresponding failure of energy in the other.

At the same time, clear knowledge that evil is illusion would defeat its
own end and paralyse all moral effort, for evil only exists for the
development of good in us.

Type needs antitype:
As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good
Needs evil: how were pity understood
Unless by pain?

This is one reason why Browning never shrank from the evil in the world,
why indeed he expended so much of his mind and art on the analysis and
dissection of every kind of evil, laying bare for us the working of the
mind of the criminal, the hypocrite, the weakling, and the cynic;
because he held that--

Only by looking low, ere looking high
Comes penetration of the mystery.