This is, of course, part
of his main belief in unity, but it is an interesting development of it.
This theory is marked all through his writings; and, although
philosophers have dealt with it, he is perhaps the one poet who faces
the problem, and expresses himself on the point with entire conviction.
His view is that good and evil are purely relative terms (see _The
Bean-stripe_), and that one cannot exist without the other. It is evil
which alone makes possible some of the divinest qualities in
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.
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