What is known as the “quantitative method” provides a valuable discipline for the student of culture because it directs his attention toward the discovery of events which are often enough repeated to raise a strong presumption that a particular sequence does actually exist. These events must be so defined that similar events can be identified by other workers. This necessitates an operational definition of the concept, which is to say, terms must be used to specify the position of the observer in relation to the configuration which it is proposed to describe.[82] The impatience among students of culture with the slow-footed quantitative approach is partly due to the diffuse, implicit nature of the experiences upon which is based the judgment about a subjective event outside one’s self, and the resulting bias of the student of culture against exaggerating the significance of items in the pattern. The statement that “his life-experience has been hued with melancholy” is a generalization which presupposes a knowledge of a prodigious number of facts. Or the statement that “the prestige of public office is greater in Germany than in any country” depends upon possible observations as numerous as the sands of the sea. Any proposition in Bryce’s _Modern Democracies_ or in Masaryk’s analysis of Russian civilization refers to tremendous ranges of data. Of course, the experience of any observer is puny beside the Gargantuan proportions of the facts, and able inquirers always proceed upon a sampling basis. They get in touch with men of every income group, every religious, every racial, and every provincial group; they study the manifestations of the culture in painting, literature, mathematics, legislation, administration, and physical science. The procedure of a Bryce was quantitative in the sense that many observations were accumulated before inferences were fixed, but it was not quantitative in the special mathematical sense of the word. The student of culture is often alienated by the quantitative approach, because the quantitative method necessitates the simplification of the number of facts taken into account; the impressionistic-quantitative approach of the student of culture gets an undivided reaction to the whole and makes simplification afterward, perhaps revising and indeed oscillating at frequent intervals.