The Aims of Literary Study Author:Hiram Corson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE AIMS OF LITERARY STUDY. ""TO the aged John of Patmos, in Robert Browning's ' A Death in the Desert," is attributed the doctrine of the trinal unity of man... more », ' How divers persons' (the word being used in the sense of parts played), How divers persons witness in each man Three souls, which make up one soul: first, to wit, A soul of each and all the bodily parts, Seated therein, which works, and is what Does, And has the use of earth, and ends the man Downward; but, tending upward for advice, Grows into, and again is grown into 1 By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, Useth the first with its collected use, And feeleth, thinketh, willeth, — is what Knows: Which, duly tending upward in its turn, Grows into, and again is grown into By the last soul, that useth both the first, Subsisting whether they assist or no, And, constituting man's self, is what Is — And leans upon the former, makes it play, As that played off the first: and, tending up, Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man Upward in that dread point of intercourse, Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him. What Does, what Knows, what Is; three souls, one man. In Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh,' Aurora says to Romney : life, you've granted me, Develops from within. But innermost Of the inmost, most interior of the interne, God claims his own, Divine humanity Renewing nature, . . . There must be but an infinitesimally small part of our absolute being which comes to consciousness in this life, however much we may be educated, in the common acceptation of that word, and however extended our outward and our inward experiences may be. Back of our conscious and active powers, is a vast and mysterious domain of unconsciousness — but a domain which is, nevertheless, our true being, and whi...« less