By an original instinct the Wells hero is an inconspicuous little person, fastidiously untheatrical, who cuts no figure personally and who, to adopt a phrase from one of his later books, "escapes from individuality in science and service." He abhors "personages." For the personage is one who, in some degree, stands on his achievement, and to Wells man, both in his love and his work, is experimental: he is an experiment toward an impersonal synthesis, the well-being of the species. It is true that this idea of man as an experiment does not conflict with a very full development of personality. It consists in that; but personality to Wells is attained purely through love and work, and thus it comes to an end the moment it becomes static, the moment one accepts the laurel wreath, the moment one verges on self-consequence. The first published utterance of Wells was, I think, a paper in _The Fortnightly Review_ for July, 1891, called _The Rediscovery of the Unique_. It was one of the earliest of those attacks on the logical approach to life, so characteristic of contemporary thought: it stamped him from the outset a pragmatist. The burden of his argument was that since the investigations of Darwin it is no longer possible to ignore the uniqueness of every individual thing in the universe and that "we only arrive at the idea of similar beings by an unconscious or deliberate disregard of an infinity of small differences"--that, in brief, the method of classification which is the soul of logic is untrue to the facts of life. "Human reason," he wrote, "in the light of what is being advanced, appears as a convenient organic process based on a fundamental happy misconception.... The _reason d'être_ of a man's mind is to avoid danger and get food--so the naturalists tell us. His reasoning powers are about as much a truth-seeking tool as the snout of a pig, and he may as well try to get to the bottom of things by them as a mole might by burrowing." I quote thus his rudely graphic early statement of the case, because he has not since substantially modified it and because it shows that he already related it to human realities: and indeed in the same paper he pointed out the relation that such an idea must bear to ordinary conduct: Beings are unique, circumstances are unique, and therefore we cannot think of regulating our conduct by wholesale dicta. A strict regard for truth compels us to add that principles are wholesale dicta: they are substitutes of more than doubtful value for an individual study of cases.