. "The widespread development of individuality in society is relatively a recent phenomenon in the world-at-large. This statement may strike the reader as strange since it is evident that humankind is and has always been nothing other than a group of individual human beings. In what sense could we possibly mean that individuality is only recently emerging as a result of the evolution of humanity? The difficulty is partially one of semantics. In English, the word individual has two related but different meanings \u2013 single and distinctive. It is commonly used to denote a single or particular member of any group, such as each individual member of the family and each individual student in the class. This is not the sense in which we use the word here. By individual, we refer to a member of the society who has acquired his or her own distinctiveness and originality. Each member of the human race is an individual in the sense of being a single, separate physical person. But very few members of the race are really social, psychological and mental individuals."@en . "Stages of individuality"@en . . "The widespread development of individuality in society is relatively a recent phenomenon in the world-at-large. This statement may strike the reader as strange since it is evident that humankind is and has always been nothing other than a group of individual human beings. In what sense could we possibly mean that individuality is only recently emerging as a result of the evolution of humanity?"@en . .