Throughout his work, Cassirer asserted that symbolic forms are “organs of reality,” that they are formative of what we apprehend as real and available to human knowing and acting. In Language and Myth (1946: 8), he wrote:

In this chapter I continue my reflection on medicine as a symbolic form through a discussion of medical semiotics. The argument that human biology or disease is “very much within culture” and best understood as a symbolic form is strongly counter-intuitive, unless we interpret this as a rather trivial recognition that all consciousness and therefore knowledge is symbolic or meaningful. Cassirer made a much stronger claim, however, when he argued that science, aesthetics, and religion are each distinctive forms of knowledge, and that mythology, for example, is a special form of reality (rather than a psychological or symbolic distortion) and a mode of apprehending the world (1955b). Cassirer's philosophical position is closely akin to the historicist theory of culture that emerged in the Boasian tradition, sharing a concern for how historically evolving cultural forms mediate experience and knowledge.