The synthetic motive gains its very force through the close-knitting of keenly-developed, proud, and valiant individualities. In Wells the synthetic motive and the individual motive qualify and buttress one another; and he is quite as much opposed to the over-predominance of the synthetic motive where the personal motive is deficient as he is to the self-indulgence of the purely personal life. Thus the Assembly in _A Modern Utopia_ is required to contain a certain number of men outside the Samurai class, because, as they explain, "there is a certain sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is necessary to the perfect ruling of life," and their Canon contains a prayer "to save the world from unfermented men." So also in _First and Last Things_ Wells remarks: "If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue of sins by asking, 'Are you a man of regular life?' and I would charge my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with publicans and sinners." Plainly his collective purpose is nothing unless it consists of will, will even to wilfulness, even to perversity. And this leads one back to that early assertion of his that since beings and circumstances are unique, we must get rid of the idea that conduct should be regulated by general principles. Similarly, at the outset of _Mankind in the Making_ he says it is necessary "to reject and set aside all abstract, refined, and intellectualized ideas as starting propositions, such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, or Beauty, and to hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a tissue and succession of births." Goodness and Beauty, he says, cannot be considered apart from good and beautiful things and one's personal notions of the good and beautiful have to be determined by one's personal belief about the meaning of life. Thus, to take an illustration from his novels, one of the most odious traits of such a father as Ann Veronica's or Mr. Pope in _Marriage_ is that they wish to regulate their daughters, not by a study of what is and must be good in their eyes, but by a general sweeping view of what good daughters ought to be.