MEASURING  BY  LIMITED  IMPRESSIONS  323

freshly  in  mind,  would  encourage  a  deliberate  instead  of  a
hasty  expression,  would  serve  as  a  check  against  emotional
prejudices,  and  would  overcome  the  serious  lapses  to
which  man’s  memory  is  subject.  Too  much  can  not  be
said  about  the  unreliability  of  the  faculty  of  memory  and
the  great  danger  of  depending  for  our  opinions  of  people
upon  so  uncertain  a  quantity.
A  periodic  written  estimate  would  do  much  to  reduce
the  sporadic  character  of  so  many  of  our  impressions
regarding  people.  However,  the  impressionistic  method
can  be  still  further  improved  upon  by  arbitrarily  limiting
the  range  over  which  our  impressions  shall  be  spread.
Without  some  arbitrary  limitation,  the  qualities  with
which  a  worker  may  be  credited  or  debited  will  be  limited
only  by  the  descriptive  vocabulary  of  the  person  making
the  estimate.  The  result  will  be  a  collection  of  biographies,
too  clumsy  and  involved  to  be  of  any  value  in  comparing
people.  Therefore,  although  men  may  be  capable  of  as
many  virtues  as  the  human  tongue  can  find  names  for,
practical  considerations  make  it  necessary  to  concentrate
upon  a  few  of  the  more  important  qualities.  Only  by
means  of  such  a  limitation  will  it  become  possible  to  find
a  uniform  basis  upon  which  to  compare  people.
The  selection  of  the  few  most  important  qualities  presents ­
  a  most  complex  problem.  To  begin  with,  we  have
no  concrete  manifestation  or  summation  of  qualities  such
as  is  offered  by  the  comparative  productiveness  of  the
piece-worker.  Probably  the  only  mathematical  or  concrete ­
  summation  of  qualities  which  we  have  is  that  signified ­
  by  the  attendance  record.  The  factor  of  attendance,
therefore,  presents  itself  as  the  most  definite  and  obvious
one  to  be  selected  for  this  purpose.  All  other  qualities
must  be  selected  after  a  more  or  less  arbitrary  method.