e title). ``Symbolic form'' is still maddeningly vague, but my impression is that it is almost, but not quite, a ``universe of discourse'' in the sense of logic. Tentatively, I'd suggest it be defined as ``a subject matter plus patterns of employing symbols to deal with it.'' I can sort of see how this might be related to a form of apperception, but the details aren't so much left vague in the Essay as non-existent. The canonical symbolic forms Cassirer discusses are: myth, language, art, religion, history and science. I think Cassirer would have said that people sometimes have ``mythic'' perceptions, and artistic (``aesthetic'') ones, but probably not scientific or historical ones. Mythic or magical perceptions would be ones colored by a vaguely-described vague feeling that everything is alive, interconnected and significant. (I have severe doubts about that: the people who came up with the myth of Armageddon don't seem to have thought of themselves as fused with the Adversary in an all-encompassing web of life.) The material on aesthetics was very interesting, but mostly because Cassirer was very good at explaining what others had thought about the puzzles, and what the problems with their ideas were, his positive ideas being quite impenetrable to me. ``Religion'' here blurs into ethics, which may or may not be adequate; in any case it's a very interior sort of religion. (Perhaps cultic activities were to fall under ``myth''.) Even when he talks about history he's mostly talking about the historian's ``bringing the past to life,'' illustrated by our understanding the motives of particular persons. Human beings as social animals do not interest him --- though presumably the means we use to order our lives in common qualify as symbolic forms within the meaning of the act. The chapter on science is mostly devoted to the idea that science is a means of bringing conceptual order to our experience of the physical world, and to illustrations...
