Should a man be reared from childhood to manhood in a jungle cut away from all contact with other human beings, from every trace of civilization, it is theoretically possible that he might never express in any articulate and conscious fashion his knowledge of the world. Yet even such a man would probably leave some sign that he had been a man. Even he, without tutoring and altogether alone in his humanity, would chisel some mark on stone, would carve some picture on the bark of a tree, would gesture to the birds and thus sign the wilderness with the imprint of his humanity. When happy he would sing. In all things essential he would be a human being. Gesture, line, and song would not be foreign to him.

But this man in the wilderness is a fiction. Man as we really find him always exists in some civilized polity no matter how primitive, in some society that is altogether different from the merely physical world. Man does not fade into the background of nature to become part of the scenery: He steps out of the world and establishes a new order of things, the order we call civilization or culture. Human society is perhaps the most difficult of all worlds for a man to understand. It is difficult because he is part of it, because it forms the immediate stage on which he acts out his role in the theatre of existence. Man is too close to society and too much a part of it to analyze it clearly with proper philosophical objectivity. Yet the effort is worth the pain.

Try to imagine for a moment what it would be like if the civilized world were simply a part of physical nature. By a supreme effort of mind and fancy eliminate every difference between the physical universe and the universe of human culture. Imagine that every cathedral and all roads, each article of clothing and every book, all flags and statues, buildings public and private, works of industry and signs of commerce, language written and spoken--imagine, if you can, that all this was simply part of brute nature as it is given us in the raw; should you succeed in your attempt you would have eliminated from civilization that which makes it human. You would have annihilated its significance, destroyed its meaning.

Nature makes sense apart from man, but the work of man makes sense only in terms of its maker. The traffic signal means a command to drive on or to halt; the kind of clothing we wear markes us as soldier, sailor, or priest. The languages we speak, materially nothing but noises reverberating through space, are charged with significance, with intention, with the breath of spirit.

. . .

Men communicate by letting something material, something belonging to the physical order, act as a vehicle or trajectory along which their thoughts and judgments, their affections and intentions, can travel to another man who is capable of "picking them up" at the other end of the road or at the far side of the trajectory. A thing, existing as such in the material order or fashioned by a man for the express purpose of communication, is made to stand for an act of knowledge, is made to bear a meaning which is not its own by nature. This is precisely what is meant by a symbol.

A symbol involves two aspects: (a) it is a material thing or a material action and, as such, it belongs to the physical universe; (b) it is made by one man to represent an act of knowledge which he wishes to communicate to other men who will grasp his meaning in the symbol he fashions. Thus, the symbol is arbitrary in the sense that men make symbols at will; men give meaning if they desire. In one society, the handshake symbolizes friendship; in another, friendship is symbolized by a kiss on the cheek. At one time men will take off their hats to signify their respect before ladies; at another time they will bow deeply from the waist. At one moment in the history of the West, the color white signified death; in time it gave way to the color black.

The whole cultural life of the race of man is shot through with symbolism and man has so kneaded nature to his own image that the very world is charged with a new meaning, a significance human in kind. And yet this massive effort to remake the world in the image of reason, to sow in ordered sequence, to carve the human form in stone, to build with grace, to incarcerate the gestures of the human spirit in the things of matter, all this symbolism is subordinate to, and is the result of, a more profound way of making symbols which is consubstantial with human nature; that is, the power to create language.

--Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Man's Knowledge of Reality, pp. 54-55, 55-56