[For Percy, as indicated in his essay "Symbol as Need" (1954),] the inclination toward symbolization is not only a uniquely human one, but one in no way explained by reference to either evolution or biology. (p. 75)

"Symbolic transformation" for him is not a "need," but rather "a means of knowing." He wants not to put labels on people, but understand what they are doing. He believes that symbols enable us to acquire not "facts," but rather knowledge "in the Thomist and existential sense of identification of the knower with the object known." (p. 76)

[As] Percy puts it, "our common existence is validated" when one person learns from another that not only does a particular flower exist, and not only does it have a name, but it exists for each of them, and that state of existence can be jointly affirmed by two human beings through the use of words...