No existent is born alone. He takes form within, or he emerges out of something that is already existing in a particular environment, and he is born in the midst of numerous existing wholes that, directly or indirectly, react to his appearance into the world.
Mind is the capacity to hold images of existence in a coherently interrelated, consistent, and formal state of consciousness.
The process of individualization very soon reveals itself fraught with great danger unless it is referred to a more encompassing reality.
The glorification of the individual person has its negative aspect in the “rugged individualism” of the American Frontiersmen, or of any frontier type of life. Its positive aspect is the ideal of the “free man” who, secure and strong in the realization of his individual self and his own truth-of-being, is able fully to cooperate with his companions in the building of the ideal democratic society of free men everywhere.
Individual differences between men are very small compared to all the life-factors these men have in common. Moreover, most members of a particular society are ninety per cent controlled by collective cultural patterns of behavior and thinking; they speak the same language and use the same symbols in terms of basically the same needs. Even the feelings of these culture-bound men and women very often coalesce into mass reactions.
The evident facts point to collective factors in human life; truly individual characteristics are magnified out of all proportion in most cases.
The purely individual person, just as the “free and equal” citizen, are mostly “myths.”