Literature may be said to give people a sense of purpose, dedication, mission, significance. This, no doubt, is part of what Gilbert Seldes implies when he says of the arts, ``They give form and meaning to life which might otherwise seem shapeless and without sense.'' Men seem almost universally to want a sense of function, that is, a feeling that their existence makes a difference to someone, living or unborn, close and immediate or generalized. Feeling useless seems generally to be an unpleasant sensation. A need so deeply planted, asking for direction, so to speak, is likely to be gratified by the vivid examples and heroic proportions of literature. The terms ``renewal'' and ``refreshed,'' which often come up in aesthetic discussion, seem partly to derive their import from the ``renewal'' of purpose and a ``refreshed'' sense of significance a person may receive from poetry, drama, and fiction. The notion of ``inspiration'' is somehow cognate to this feeling. How literature does this, or for whom, is certainly not clear, but the content, form, and language of the ``message,'' as well as the source, would all play differentiated parts in giving and molding a sense of purpose.

One of the most salient features of literary value has been deemed to be its influence upon and organization of emotion. Let us differentiate a few of these ideas. The Aristotelian notion of catharsis, the purging of emotion, is a persistent and viable one. The idea here is one of discharge but this must stand in opposition to a second view, Plato's notion of the arousal of emotion. A third idea is that artistic literature serves to reduce emotional conflicts, giving a sense of serenity and calm to individuals. This is given some expression in Beardsley's notion of harmony and the resolution of indecision. A fourth view is the transformation of emotion, as in Housman's fine phrase on the arts: they ``transform and beautify our inner nature.'' It is possible that the idea of enrichment of emotion is a fifth idea. F. S. C. Northrop, in his discussion of the ``Functions and Future of Poetry,'' suggests this: ``One of the things which makes our lives drab and empty and which leaves us, at the end of the day, fatigued and deflated spiritually is the pressure of the taxing, practical, utilitarian concern of common-sense objects. If art is to release us from these postulated things [things we must think symbolically about] and bring us back to the ineffable beauty and richness of the aesthetic component of reality in its immediacy, it must sever its connection with these common sense entities.'' I take the central meaning here to be the contrast between the drab empty quality of life without literature and a life enriched by it. Richards' view of the aesthetic experience might constitute a sixth variety: for him it constitutes, in part, the organization of impulses.