"In contrast to a modern sense of individuality, humans of earlier periods seem to have felt themselves much more an integral part of their surroundings, immersed in the community, often finding their true identity not in themselves but in the tribe or the group, and embedded in an all-embracing world organism that spoke directly to them in symbol and myth with a reality more ultimate than any conferred by a sense of individual selfhood. In fact consciousness of being a separate, self-contained individual, rather than being immersed and sustained in the communal and the world-whole, would have been experienced as a loss of meaning and reality--a pulling away from the source of things."
DOUGLAS SLOAN. (1993) The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World