158 Inside the Living Cell 



The third stage occurred when the organism became a mobile 

 animal and acquired muscles to move about, sense organs to tell it 

 about its environment and a brain to join them together. The animal 

 in this way became aware of the world it lived in, at least to a limited 

 extent. 



The fourth great stage in the ascent of life, which must be regarded 

 as still in its infancy, is the attainment by man of the power to replace 

 the actual world, as it is experienced, by a world of symbolic equiva- 

 lents, which can be manipulated in the mind and rearranged. As I 

 have pointed out, this permits the storing of experiences, so that it be- 

 comes possible to have knowledge which is not based on the limited 

 experience of each individual. As a result of this, human knowledge 

 exists and grows independently of the individuals who make some 

 use of it. It possesses a dynamism of its own. The knowledge and the 

 symbolisms in which it is expressed and the ways of thinking and 

 acting to which these give rise, give human societies their peculiar 

 character. The society becomes in fact a superorganism, because the 

 individual cannot live to more than a very partial extent without it 

 and the way he lives is largely determined, not by his own simple re- 

 actions to his experience, but by the knowledge and ways of living 

 which the superorganism has arrived at. 



There are of course other superorganisms besides the human ones, 

 e.g. those created by the social insects, but so far as we know, the 

 latter are held together by instinct. The human superorganisms are 

 characterized by shared knowledge, which, as we have seen, is 

 achieved by the human ability to turn experiences into symbolic 

 equivalents which can be passed from person to person. The super- 

 structure of communal knowledge provides a kind of scaffolding with- 

 in which the life of every individual is lived. It is not a static scaffold- 

 ing, but one which changes continuously. For this reason the life of 

 an individual in Western Europe in the twentieth century for example, 

 is quite different to that of a similar individual a hundred years 

 earlier, although his mental capacities may be similar. Not only does 

 his mind operate on different data, but it operates in different ways 

 which are determined by the very different symbolic environment in 

 which he lives. The individual life is an interaction between the float- 

 ing climate of ideas and his own personal reaction to them. 



The shared mass of ideas, which do not belong to any one person 

 exclusively, but are the possession of a whole community, or a large 

 part of it, form what may be regarded as a collective mind, which 

 possesses a kind of life of its own. It develops according to its own 

 laws or inner necessities. This has been clearly recognized in the 

 many histories which have been written about the development of 



