present materials for action, which often decline to furnish to us any data whatever that are at once vivid with the clearness of our sense perceptions, and adequate to our inner aim. But the same frequent divorce of inner aim and observable outward expression is also in part due to the confusedness of our inward purposes themselves, or to the fragmentariness with which we hold to these purposes, — in brief, to our powerlessness to retain before us the inner vision itself. And consequently we are accustomed to regard thought which conceives, and will which executes, as two sundered functions of our conscious life; because sometimes we have relatively clear masses of ideas, to which we still cannot give the vivid clothing of outer sense, and sometimes the defect seems to be that while outer sense is plastic, ideas are halting, and we know not what to undertake. Yet all such diversity is so far only one of the aspects. All our thinking is itself a process of willing; all our conscious deeds are merely immediately visible and tangible ideas. And the truer contrast between the idea and its Other is the one upon which Browning’s lover has fixed his attention. This contrast is between the inadequacy of all the expressions, whether inner or outer, which we just now find ourselves able to give to our finite purposes, — between this inadequacy of expression, and just these purposes themselves. The act never proves, for us, all that its thought had been. And by the “fleshly screen” that hinders the will, our lover in the poem means the same that we here more technically mean by whatever proves to be uncontrollable about the immediacy of our present conscious life.
