But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal in Love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his conception of it. The "Love" which has so deep a significance for Browning is a Love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history. His was one of the rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction, encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their principles and united their forces. Psychologically, the one had its strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other in that which feels, and values emotions. Sociologically, the one stood for individualism, the other for solidarity. In their ultimate presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism. In their political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its safeguard. In two of these four points of contrast, Browning's temperament ranged him more or less decisively on the Liberal side. Individualist to the core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class. Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle; and he became the _vates sacer_ of unsatisfied aspiration. On the other hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women's Suffrage and Home Rule. In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to the spiritual and emotional reaction. Spirit was for him the ultimate fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities. But his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or to interpret them in its own terms. And in the conflict between reason and feeling, or, as he put it, between "head" and "heart," as sources of insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most brilliant champion in Browning, and its most impressive statement in his doctrine of Love. An utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite of "that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning was Paracelsus as well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "Knowledge" and