140 Inside the Living Cell 



Human knowledge is thus quite different from the instinctive 

 knowledge, if we could call it knowledge, of insects or from that of 

 animals, who clearly acquire a 'practical' working knowledge of the 

 world they live in, which is at least sufficient for them to live. Human 

 beings have this 'practical' knowledge; but over and above it is the 

 knowledge derived from the alternative world of symbols. As a rule 

 the human being does not discover these symbols for himself — he 

 learns them from others and he learns for himself the correspon- 

 dences between the symbol and his own observations. It is often very 

 difficult to distinguish direct interpretations of experience and those 

 which are derived from the shared symbols. 



In this way human life has become necessarily and essentially a 

 communal life. The human being is like a radio station — being both 

 a transmitter and a receiver. It is tuned in, as it were, to all or many 

 of the other stations and is continually receiving and emitting mes- 

 sages. In fact the interpretations a person makes of his sense exper- 

 iences are very much influenced by his symbolic picture, i.e. by the 

 shared knowledge he has learnt from other people. 



So we see that human beings, through their great ability to replace 

 the actual world by a symbolic world, which goes alongside the real 

 world and interacts with it all the time, have found a quite new way 

 of living. The world of symbols is obviously not static. It is interact- 

 ing with the real world all the time. Every new experience has to be 

 fitted into the symbol world; and in the same way every act is deter- 

 mined, not only by the actual world, but by all sorts of considera- 

 tions which come from the world of symbols. 



The two worlds, the world of direct sense impressions and the 

 world of symbols, go on side by side and the one helps to interpret 

 the other. From the world of words and other symbols — the accumu- 

 lated knowledge which we have acquired — we are helped to interpret 

 what we see. What we do is obviously determined by the symbolic 

 outlook to a considerable extent. 



It is a characteristic of human life that it is not static — like the life 

 of the bee or the life of animals, which necessarily go on in much the 

 same way for many generations. For one thing, human knowledge 

 is not stationary — the symbols which human beings use to interpret 

 life to themselves develop or at least change from time to time. This 

 is because human beings, although they can learn the meaning of 

 symbols, have to interpret their own experiences for themselves. 

 They must always be engaged in interpreting their sense impressions 

 and in finding symbolic interpretations which are satisfactory to 

 themselves and can be communicated to others. They naturally use 

 accepted symbols a good deal, but because the act of interpretation 



