Using Tools and Symbols 141 



is a personal one, the interpretations rarely remain unchanged for 

 long and successive generations may find new ways of looking at 

 things, which will lead to new ways of doing things. In other words 

 the search for meanings in which human beings are engaged, leads to 

 invention and discovery. 



As a result of this the human way of living is dynamic. As I have 

 already pointed out, it would be wrong to regard the animal way of 

 life as completely static; but the human way has a totally different 

 tempo of change. 



To sum up, the peculiar ability of the mass of cells which make 

 up the human brain is not only to make a picture or model of the world 

 from the information it obtains from the senses but to construct an 

 alternative substitute world of symbols, which is a shared superstruc- 

 ture of human life. Everything human depends on this ability of 

 human beings to live at one and the same time on these two levels — 

 the level of direct experience and the level of symbols. The direct 

 experience belongs to the individual alone; the symbolic level is 

 necessarily shared because the symbols of which it is made and the 

 ways in which they are combined are a communal possession. 



