Their individual activity and history do not make them less alike.

It merely makes them bigger or smaller, livelier or more inert.

Their distinction from their fellows is quantitative; the unity of their various phases a matter of repetition; their independence wholly comparative.

Such men are associated with their fellows in the pursuit of a common purpose, and they are divided from their fellows by the energy and success with which that purpose is pursued.

On the other hand, a condition favorable to genuine individuality would be one in which men were divided from one another by special purposes, and reunited in so far as these individual purposes were excellently and successfully achieved.
The truth is that individuality cannot be dissociated from the pursuit of a disinterested object.