"Reality" in "the least atom" will be known, only when knowledge has
completed its work, and the universe has become a transparent sphere,
penetrated in every direction by the shafts of intelligence.

But this is only half the truth. If knowledge is never complete, it is
always _completing_; if reality is never known, it is ever _being
known_; if the ideal is never actual, it is always _being actualized_.
The complete failure of knowledge is as impossible as its complete
success. It is at no time severed from reality; it is never its mere
adumbration, nor are its contents mere phenomena. On the contrary, it is
reality partially revealed, the ideal incompletely actualized. Our very
errors are the working of reality within us, and apart from it they
would be impossible. The process towards truth by man is the process of
truth _in_ man; the movement of knowledge towards reality is the movement
of reality into knowledge. A purely subjective consciousness which knows,
such as the poet tried to describe, is a self-contradiction: it would be
a consciousness at once related, and not related, to the actual world.
But man has no need to relate himself to the world. He is already
related, and his task is to understand that relation, or, in other words,
to make both its terms intelligible. Man has no need to go out from
himself to facts; his relation to facts is prior to his distinction from
them. The truth is that he cannot entirely lift himself away from them,
nor suspend his thoughts in the void. In his inmost being he is
creation's voice, and in his knowledge he confusedly murmurs its deep
thoughts.

Browning was aware of this truth in its application to man's moral
nature. In speaking of the principle of love, he was not tempted to
apply fixed alternatives. On the contrary, he detected in the "poorest
love that was ever offered" the veritable presence of that which is