From this one can deduce the importance of the “cultural aspect,” even in practical (collective) activity. An historical act can only be performed by “collective man,” and this presupposes the attainment of a “cultural-social” unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated, and experienced that it becomes passion).

The institution of society is in each case the institution of a magma of social imaginary significations, which we can and must call a world of significations. For it is one and the same thing to say that society institutes the world in each case as its world or its world as the world, and to say that it institutes a world of significations that is its own, that it institutes itself in instituting the world of significations that is its own, in correlation to which alone, a world can and does exist for it.…Society brings into being a world of significations and itself exists in reference to such a world.