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 pre 
sents 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 con 
crete summation of qualities which we have is that signi 
fied 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.