Though he thus opened up new vistas for the benefit of man, he must necessarily be a failure, from his own point of view, with his "India" not found, his absolute truth unattained; and it is upon this side that the poet dwells. For a moment he is somewhat reassured by the apparition of Aprile, scarcely a creature of flesh and blood, more the spirit of art who aspires to love infinitely and has found the attainment of such love as impossible as Paracelsus has found the attainment of knowledge. Both have desired to help men, but Paracelsus has desired to help them rather through the perfecting, even immortalizing, of their physical being; Aprile, through giving man, as he is, infinite sympathy and through creating forms of beauty which would show him his own thoughts and hopes glorified by the all-seeing touch of the artist. Paracelsus recognizes his deficient sympathy for mankind, and tries to make up for it in his own way by giving out of the fulness of his knowledge to men. The scornful and proud reformer has not, however, truly learned the lesson of love, and verily has his reward when he is turned against by those whom he would teach. Then the old ideal seizes upon him again, and still under the influence of Aprile he seeks in human experience the loves and passions of mankind which he learns through Aprile he had neglected for the ever-illusive secret, but neither does success attend him here, and only on his deathbed does his vision clear up, and he is made to indulge in a prophetic utterance quite beyond the reach of the original Paracelsus. In this passage is to be found Browning's first contribution to a solution of the great problem. That it is instinct with the idea of evolution has become a commonplace of Browning criticism, a fact which was at least independently or, as far as I know, first pointed out by myself in an early essay upon Browning. At the time, I was reading both Browning and Spencer, and could not but be impressed by the parallelisms in thought between the two, especially those in this seer-like passage and "The Data of Ethics." Writers whose appreciation of a poet is in direct ratio to the number of exact historical facts to be found in a poem like to emphasize this fact that the doctrine of evolution can be found in the works of Paracelsus. Why not? Since, as we have seen it had been floating about in philosophical thought in one form or another for some thousands of years.