"Pragmatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with crowded beauty, is to-day rooted, despoiled, trampled, and utterly devoured, and all over the ground you shall find but the rejected cuds of flowers and leaves, and forms that have been champed for their juices and then rejected. Such to me is the Bible, when the pragmatic prophecy-monger and the swinish utilitarian have toothed its fruits ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the Austrian dominions in Italy was fully explained and vindicated, by a person who sat opposite to me, and, by the solemnity of his manner and the richness of his apparel, seemed to be a foreign ambassador. This dissertation produced another on the Pragmatic Sanction, handled with great warmth by a young gentleman at my right hand, dressed in a green frock, trimmed with gold, who justified the French king for his breach of that contract; and affirmed that he could not have observed it without injuring his own glory. Although I was not at ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... brings deplorable results. Bolshevism is not merely a body of belief and speculation. When the Bolsheviki seized the government of Russia and began to attempt to carry out their ideas, Bolshevism became a living movement in a world of reality and subject to the acid test of pragmatic criteria. It must be judged by such a matter-of-fact standard as the extent to which it has enlarged or diminished the happiness, health, comfort, freedom, well-being, satisfaction, and efficiency of the greatest number of individuals. Unless the test shows ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... aesthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them[301] puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... This belief is based primarily on the fact that most of the specimens have been chosen and approved by generation after generation of children, culled out from the light and worthless as by an unerring hand, through the most pragmatic of tests. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... hand, needs no religion at all.'[19] There is something to be said for both of these views, James thinks, and a compromise will probably best meet the case. Hence, against these two ways of accepting the universe, he maintains the pragmatic faith which is at once theistic, pluralistic, and melioristic. He accepts a personal power as a workable theory of the universe. But God need not be infinite or all-inclusive, for 'all that the facts ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... his return. She had always had a vague comprehension of those pragmatic qualities in his nature which placed him miles above her, or beneath her, or beyond her. She had drunk of the cup which had been offered her, and she must not rebel because a bitter sediment lay on her lips. She ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... too—had read much, and all that kind of thing. But he was not the sort of man you might expect to get on well with women. Unless with very intimate friends, he was a trifle silent and reserved. Often he was inclined to be pragmatic and sententious, and had a habit of saying unpleasantly bitter things when some careless joke was being made. He was a little dingy in appearance; and a man who had a somewhat cold manner, who was sallow of face, who was obviously ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... of) a medium-sized can, with wire handles and a lid. Used to boil water. If for tea, the leaves are added into the billy itself; the billy may be swung ('to make the leaves settle') or a eucalyptus twig place across the top, more ritual than pragmatic. These stories are supposedly told while the billy is suspended over the fire at night, at the end of a tramp. (Also used in want of other things, for cooking) blackfellow (also, blackman): condescending for Australian Aboriginal ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... the moral depravity of man. Such thoughts demoralize and weaken the individual. Miracles, in the accepted sense, New Thought does not conceive as possible in a universe of law. The only miracles are phenomena not understood, but nevertheless the result of law. It applies the pragmatic test to every religion and philosophy. Are you true? What do you give to a man to carry to his daily task?" "New Thought recognizes no authority save the voice of the soul speaking to each individual. Every soul can interpret aright the ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: See A Poet's Epitaph, and Sonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... to general principles mainly by decisions of the Privy Council and the House of Lords but, of course, we have had New Zealand conditions and practicalities very much in mind. The result has been a pragmatic approach. ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... Pierson's departure, Gratian and George often discussed Noel's conduct and position by the light of the Pragmatic theory. George held a suitably scientific view. Just as he would point out to his wife—in the physical world, creatures who diverged from the normal had to justify their divergence in competition ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... diplomatic knowledge and political sagacity. Their capital feats were the creation of two kingdoms, both of which are already erased from the map of Europe. They made no single preparation for the inevitable, almost impending, conjunctures of the East. All that remains of the pragmatic arrangements of the mighty Congress of Vienna is the mediatisation of ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... the poor, nor a slave to the great, Neither factious in church, nor pragmatic in state, He keeps himself quiet within his own sphere, And finds work sufficient in preaching ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... should wish to pursue it at the first favourable opportunity of conquest. That opportunity came to Prussia when Charles VI died and the Archduchess Maria Theresa succeeded to her father by virtue of a law (the Pragmatic Sanction), to which all the Powers of Europe had subscribed. Frederick had subscribed to it. But, nevertheless, in the name of Prussia, without any proper excuse or even decent pretext, he took possession of Silesia, thereby ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... and Glambe, professed themselves to be entirely satisfied as to their bona fides, and exhibited an eagerness to be of immediate service to the ladies in whatever capacity might be conceived. Mrs. Makebelieve instantly invoked the Pragmatic Sanction; she put the entire matter to the touchstone of absolute verity by demanding an advance of fifty pounds. Her mind reeled as she said the astounding amount, but her voice did not. A check was signed and a clerk dispatched, who returned with eight five-pound notes and ten sovereigns ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... general assent which this proposition will doubtless command, it is deserving of special emphasis at the present time. Students of religion have latterly shifted attention from its claims to truth to its utility and subjective form. This pragmatic and psychological study of religion has created no little confusion of mind concerning its real meaning, and obscured that which is after all its essential claim—the claim, namely, to offer an illumination of life. Religious belief, like all belief, is ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... which he perceived we wanted; yet in spite of his encomiums, there was nothing in the behaviour of the girl that corresponded with such an amiable character: she had, indeed a beautiful face, but strongly marked with something, more like impudence than boldness, and more of that of a pragmatic mistress than an humble servant; and therefore we did not accept, what I was very certain, she would not have performed. I impatiently, however, waited their return, and verily believed the old man had bought his crimson velvet breeches and gold-laced waistcoat in honour of the Virgin, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... again behind them, Dyaus, the brilliant sky, the Greek Zeus, the Roman Iovis and Iuppiter, the most natural of all the Aryan gods of nature. This is real evolution, a real causal nexus between the present and the past. It used to be called history or pragmatic history, whether we take history in the sense of the description of evolution, or in that of evolution itself. History has generally to begin with the present, to go back to the past, and to point ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... in arms in the town, and wherever by him there was a Diabolonian found, they were forced to feel the weight of his heavy hand, and also the edge of his penetrating sword: many therefore of the Diabolonians he wounded, as the Lord Cavil, the Lord Brisk, the Lord Pragmatic, and the Lord Murmur; several also of the meaner sort he did sorely maim; though there cannot at this time an account be given you of any that he slew outright. The cause, or rather the advantage that my Lord Willbewill had at this ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... disturbing. For if the 'loose relation' had to be admitted in one instance, it was admitted in principle; and one could not get rid of the suspicion that it would turn up elsewhere, and that the banishment of it from every other field represented a convenient pragmatic postulate rather than a solid metaphysical truth. Moreover, the correlation of the unitary soul with the unitary gland might do justice to a mechanistical philosophy, but it did not do justice to the soul's ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... witness this ceremony. As soon as Francis II. and Marie Louise had taken their seats beneath the canopy, the Emperor, as head of the family, spoke as follows: "Inasmuch as the customs of the Imperial family require that the Imperial Princesses and Archduchesses shall before marriage recognize the Pragmatic Sanction of Austria, and the order of succession, by a solemn act of renunciation, Her Imperial Highness the Archduchess Marie Louise, who is betrothed to His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of the French, King of Italy, is about to take the usual oath, and proceed to the formal ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... King of Spain was negotiating elsewhere, with the Emperor Charles VI., the most ancient and hitherto the most implacable of his enemies. This prince had no son, and wished to secure the succession to his eldest daughter, the Arch-duchess Maria Theresa. The Pragmatic-Sanction which declared this wish awaited the assent of Europe; that of Spain was of great value; she offered, besides, to open her ports to the Ostend Company, lately established by the emperor to compete against ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... "This is all so new ... I know so little ... and am working with such pitifully inadequate instrumentation—However, we have months of time yet, and if I am unable to arrive at a conclusion before arrival—I don't mean a rigorous analysis, of course, but merely a stop-gap, empirical, pragmatic solution—we will simply remain in orbit around that ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... writer[82] remarks correctly that Schiller occupies with Kant a middle stage between the older pragmatic historians, upon whom Faust[83] pours his scathing ridicule, and the later school of Ranke, whose principle was to extinguish self and simply tell what happened and how. He does not moralize like his predecessors, nor is he guilty of treating the distant past ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... most of its history since independence from British administration in 1946, Jordan was ruled by King HUSSEIN (1953-1999). A pragmatic ruler, he successfully navigated competing pressures from the major powers (US, USSR, and UK), various Arab states, Israel, and a large internal Palestinian population, through several wars and coup attempts. ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... beliefs are not subject to pragmatic tests. That is, the spiritual beliefs aren't. Any belief that could be disproven by such a test would eventually die out. But beliefs in ghosts or demons or angels or life after death aren't disprovable by material tests, any more than they are ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... all events Francis did not evince much indulgence for the man whose wife he had seduced. Under date April, 1518, the Journal dun Bourgeois de Paris mentions the arrest of several advocates and others for daring to discuss the question of the Pragmatic Sanction. Disome was implicated in the matter but appears to have escaped for a time; however in September of that year we find him detained at Orleans and subjected to the interrogatories of various royal Commissioners. The affair was then adjourned ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... taper he prepared to light the wax candles in the nine-branched candlestick of silver. He wore a long, hooded mantle reaching to the feet, and showing where it fell back in front a brown gaberdine clasped by a girdle. These sombre-colored robes were second-hand, as the austere simplicity of the Pragmatic required. The Jewish Council of Sixty did not permit its subjects to ruffle it like the Romans of those days of purple pageantry. The young bloods, forbidden by Christendom to style themselves signori, were forbidden by Judea to vie with signori ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... indulge himself "a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do it." From Milton and the Earl of Clarendon to William Pitt, England was no country of lost causes and impossible enthusiasms. It was a pragmatic age, in which the scientific discoveries of Newton are the highest intellectual achievement, and the conclusion of Pope that "everything that is is best" gives the quality ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... universe who has a spark of admiration for this most puissant and most felicitous monarch crowned by God Emperor and King of the greater part of Europe (and docked of most of his pretensions by the Treaty of Utrecht)? We only remember the forcible-feeble person by his Pragmatic Sanction, and otherwise his personality has left in history not the remotest trace. And yet, on the 12th February, 1723, a profoundly erudite, subtle, and picturesque historian grovels before the man and subscribes himself "Of your ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... army, he had been resolute in seeing that the officers and soldiers in that army should not be troubled or kept down for Anabaptism or the like. This had been the more necessary because the next in command under him, the Scottish Major-general Crawford, was an ardent and pragmatic Presbyterian. "Sir," Cromwell had written to Crawford on one occasion, when an Anabaptist colonel had been put under disgrace, "the State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. I advised you formerly ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... has been brought into popular use to denote the test by which the pragmatists measure all systems, theories and doctrines. The pragmatic inquiry when applied to any system, theory, or doctrine may be understood to mean, "does it meet its claims in practice?" Although much is being made of this phase of pragmatism, the test is as old as the race, and verified by Scripture, for Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... and the government of Hungary was committed to a stadtholder at Pressburg who was made independent of the Diet and responsible to the sovereign alone. The diet of 1722 likewise accepted formally the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 by which the Emperor Charles settled the succession to his hereditary dominions, in default of male heirs, upon his daughter Maria Theresa and her heirs;[649] and in measures promulgated during the succeeding year the Emperor entered ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... for adopting beliefs that fit the trend of its habits and feelings, and this trend is powerfully molded by the unanimous direction of an army's purpose. There is an all but irresistible orthodoxy within a body committed to a war. And the current (pragmatic) psychology referred to, making the intelligence a mere instrument of the will, would seem to sanction the maxim, "First decide, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... beings without any special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men. But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a picture, for instance, is that in A Legend of Montrose of the conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune, rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his own liberation! Who could read that scene and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... not guided by its own independent ideal of speculative completeness. [Footnote: This was to be well explained by Fontenelle, Preface sur l'utilite des mathematiques, in Oeuvres (ed. 1729), iii, I sqq.] But this does not invalidate Bacon's pragmatic principle, or diminish the importance of the fact that in laying down the utilitarian view of knowledge he contributed to the creation of a new mental atmosphere in which the theory of Progress was ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... spirit of Ancient History, and more particularly of that of the Romans; and the history of his own country was familiar to him even in detail. Fortunately for him it had not as yet been treated in a diplomatic and pragmatic spirit, but merely in the chronicle-style; in other words, it had not yet assumed the appearance of dry investigations respecting the development of political relations, diplomatic negotiations, finances, &c., but exhibited ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... subtle theologian who has been clever enough to add to his "repertoire" a certain evasive mist of pragmatic modernism, under the filmy and wavering vapours of which the inveterate sacerdotalism of his temperament covers its tracks. But with Pascal we get clean away from ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Netherlands. The clamor was great and general; jealousy of the commercial prosperity of Holland being the real motive. Long negotiations took place on the subject of the treaty; and in December, 1718, the republic consented to modify some of the articles. The Pragmatic Sanction, published at Vienna in 1713 by Charles VI., regulated the succession to all the imperial hereditary possessions; and, among the rest, the provinces of the Netherlands. But this arrangement, though guaranteed by the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... be, sprung alertly up from the floor, calling aloud, "A miracle, a miracle, my masters! as brave a miracle as ever was wrought in the kirk of Kennaquhair. And I charge you, my masters, as your lawfully chosen Abbot, that you touch no one without my command—You, wolf and bear, will guard this pragmatic youth, but without hurting him—And you, reverend brother, will, with your comrades, withdraw to your cells; for our conference has ended like all conferences, leaving each of his own mind, as before; and if we fight, both you, and your brethren, and the Kirk, will have ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... and Leo X. came together, and, after conferring, determined that the Pragmatic Sanction should be repudiated; Leo, because he must increase his revenues, and Francis, because he desired to use appointments to rich vacancies as rewards for his friends. Leo's tastes, as we know, were magnificent, and needed much more money than he could command; a fact ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... with which to face the future—so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships—and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... him fine manners. It was a difficult undertaking. Often, as might have been expected, she lost her patience. Mary was an excellent girl, but rather kindlesome and pragmatic. Like most of the prairie folk, for instance, Abe Lincoln had been accustomed to reach for the butter with his own knife, and to find rest in attitudes extremely indolent and unbecoming. He enjoyed sprawling on the floor in his shirt-sleeves and slippers with a pillow under his head ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... enter the field of psychological investigation. The general psychological problem is to describe the actual psychic events as they occur, to analyze them into their simplest elements, and inasmuch as it is this purely pragmatic application of psychology to the problem of inference that concerns us, we need to deal only with that law which defines the combination of images and with the question,—how the spirit achieves this combination. The material aspect of this question is therefore psychological. The legal importance ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... investiture of the dukedoms of Tuscany, Parma, and Placentia, to the eldest son of the queen of Spain, in default of heirs in the present possessors, as masculine fiefs of the empire. Spain became guarantee of the Austrian succession, according to the pragmatic sanction, by which the dominions of that house were settled on the emperors's heirs general, and declared to be a perpetual, indivisible, and inseparable feoffment of the primogeniture. By the commercial treaty of Vienna, the Austrian subjects were entitled ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... thing. Pragmatism appears to teach that any individual, as such, has a moral right to adopt any hypothesis live enough to appeal to his individual will. One has only to call to mind the extraordinary assortment of guests collected by Signer Papini in his novel pragmatic "hotel." [Footnote: Ibid.] Can such, by any human ingenuity, be moulded into anything resembling an ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... crime; division of labour and specialization which degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance, capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches "run on business methods" and recruited by ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... of the Nineteenth; Comparative Speed of Light and Electricity; Wonderful Photography; Wooden Cloth; The Phylloxera; Falling Rents; Boston Civilization; Psychic Blundering; Beecher's Mediumship; A Scientific Cataract; Obstreperous and Pragmatic Vulgarity; Hygiene; Quinine; Life and Death; Dorothea L. Dix; The Drift of Catholicism; Juggernaut The Principal Methods of Studying the Brain Responses ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... sooner had the Council of Constance restored the head of the unified church to Rome than the old conflict again burst forth. [Sidenote: 1438] The extreme claims of the Gallican church were asserted in the law known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, by which the pope was left hardly any right of appointment, of jurisdiction, or of raising revenue in France. The supremacy of a council over the pope was explicitly asserted, as was the right of the civil magistrate to ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... ended, even if in forms obscure and hidden. Long years afterwards, he may exhibit this same emotion, imagination, truth and form, in deeds that proclaim loudly the return from his fairy tales. However, if the child is being surrounded by pragmatic influences through his teachers he will soon become aware that his feelings are useless unless he does something because of them; that what he sees is worthless unless he sees to some purpose; that it is somewhat fruitless to know the truth and not use ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... depreciate his own verses as compared with Lewis', some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of their author, says Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... out of new possibilities presented by the ever-newly-created opportunities of ever-new time. We get a right to the type of voluntaristic conception of man which most of us live by—with a reasonable harmony between our science and our pragmatic needs and ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... reminding the reader of Catiline's conspiracy in the Sergestus, furens animi, who dashes upon the rock in his mad eagerness to win, and obtrudes etymology in the phrase segnem Menoeten (1. 173). One is tempted to suspect that the whole narrative of the boat-race is filled with pragmatic allusions. If the characters of his epic must be connected with well-known Roman families, it is at least interesting that the connections are indicated in the fifth book and not in the passages where the names first meet the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... condemnation against the Duke of Ferrara. Lewis XII strove in vain to alarm him by the National Council of Tours,—Germany, by severe gravamina (complaints of national grievances against the Papal See), and by the threat of the Pragmatic Sanction (an imperial order to confirm the decrees of such reform councils as that of Basel). Not even a General Council, summoned at Pisa by the two monarchs for the first of September, 1511, with the dread phantom of a reform of the Church, could bend the violent Pope." The Council of Pisa ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... spirit which never fail to strike chords in the heart as well as the brain. No writer's work leaves a better taste in the mouth; he makes us think better of the world, of righteousness, of ourselves. Yet no writer is less of a Puritan or a Philistine; none writes with less of pragmatic purpose or a less obtrusive load of positive fact. He scorns such overladen pedantry, and never loses a chance to lash it. He tells us that he has "never been inside the reading-room of the British Museum," and "expounds no theory save ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... therefore, that elements of science should be taught to children for the moral effects of its influences. At the same time all truth is not sensuous, and this training alone at this age tends to make the mind pragmatic, dry, and insensitive or unresponsive to that other kind of truth the value of which is not measured by its certainty so much as by its effect upon us. We must learn to interpret the heart and our native instincts as truthfully ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic; most important elements of religion are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; about 2-3% Muslim, ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... to the throne than he started on an aggressive expansionist policy for Prussia. The opportunity presented itself a few months after his accession by the dispute as to the Pragmatic Sanction and Maria Theresa's right to the throne of Austria. In the two wars which immediately followed, the Prussian army overran the whole of Silesia, and the peace of 1745 left the Prussian King ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... The pragmatic view that "truth is what works" had not been as yet expressed when Freud published his revolutionary views ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... depends less upon the arguments of speculative theology and the findings of biblical science than upon sociological considerations. The church is dealing with a pragmatic public which insists upon knowing what this or that institution accomplishes for the common good. The deep and growing interest in social science, the crying needs that it lays bare, together with socialistic dreams of human welfare, compel Christian ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... Etherington's merits were not confined to his external appearance; for, had his better fortunes failed him, his deserts, like those of Hamlet, might have got him a fellowship in a cry of players. He presented, though in dumb show, the pragmatic conceit of Bottom, to the infinite amusement of all present, especially of those who were well acquainted with the original; and when he was "translated" by Puck, he bore the ass's head, his newly-acquired ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... his detachment or attachment to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so important as his personal impressions of both the little things and the big things of our contemporary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you must, if you are at all in love with life, become a Jamesonian after you have read the "Letters"! And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, may resemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and kept himself so tactfully in the background, that you ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... forgive Mr. J. S. anything, properly headed. I would allow him to prove—for himself—that the Quadrature of the Circle is the child of a private marriage between the Bull Unigenitus and the Pragmatic Sanction, claiming tithe of onions for repeal of the Mortmain Act, before the Bishops in Committee under the kitchen table: his mode of imitating reason would do this with ease. But when he puts his imitation into my mouth, to make me ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... the kitchen garden; a cheerful fire burnt in the grate this autumn morning, and in a big chair before it sat a cheerful, comely person in a print gown, in whom he recognized Mrs. Fryar the cook. Gordon the chauffeur, a pragmatic young man from the Clyde, in this levelling hour was sitting on the edge of the table with a glass of beer in his hand. Caroline, the Baptist housemaid, held the floor: she was declaiming, when Lawrence entered, that it was a shame of Major Clowes and she didn't ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience, is the only reality, the only fact: if notions which do not reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... latter part of his life, his principal object had been to secure to his descendants in the female line the many crowns of the House of Hapsburg. With this view he had promulgated a new law of succession, widely celebrated throughout Europe under the name of the Pragmatic Sanction. By virtue of this law, his daughter, the Archduchess Maria Theresa, wife of Francis of Lorraine, succeeded to the dominions ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... saw at one time a fresh chance for trying her policy, and she held out every inducement in her power to the Emperor Charles the Sixth and to Russia to enter into a combination against France and England. The Emperor was without a son, and, in consequence, had issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction, providing that his hereditary dominions in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia should descend to his daughter Maria Theresa. The great Powers of Europe had not as yet seen fit to guarantee, or ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... before the death of Charles, he had bound all the leading powers of Europe in a sort of agreement called the Pragmatic Sanction, by the terms of which, in case he should leave no son, all his hereditary dominions—that is, the kingdom of Hungary, the kingdom of Bohemia, the archduchy of Austria, and the other possessions of the House of Austria— should be bestowed upon his daughter Maria Theresa. But no ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... time, was beheaded out of hand by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to whom had been transferred devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to receive. The Court which had been a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance degenerated into a knot of sycophants humouring the pragmatic and self-important folly of a king in whom had implanted themselves all the vices of the Scots and none of their virtues. Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. The bright day was done and they were for the dark. The uprising ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the Pragmatic Sanction.*—The immediate effect of the termination of the Turkish wars was to enhance yet further the despotism of the Hapsburgs in Hungary. In 1687 the Emperor Leopold I. induced a rump diet at Pressburg to ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... of terrorism. The United States will assume a clear and pragmatic approach in prosecuting the campaign against terrorism. This will include incentives for ending state sponsorship. When a state chooses not to respond to such incentives, tough decisions will be confronted. At ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... the light, and that dozens of them have been lying about for years, compelled the course adopted, in spite of the natural disinclination of a writer whose works have been so frequently regarded askance by a pragmatic section here and there, to draw attention to them ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... a grand function. Dietrich, solemnly appointed 'Patrician,' had Italy ceded to him by a 'Pragmatic' sanction, and Zeno placed on his head the sacrum velamen, a square of purple, signifying in Constantinople things wonderful, august, imperial—if they could only be made to come to pass. And he made them come ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... sturdy, long-legged lad succumbed to the charms of his parentless cousin—the daughter of the minister's brother, who had settled in France and taken to himself a French wife—and he became her defender against those inhabitants of the Manse and the parish—from his brother Wattie to the pragmatic schoolmaster—whose ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... never been a land of the Salic Law; the story of her reigning queens—chief of all, Isabel la Catolica, shows this. It was not until the time of Philip V., the first of the Bourbons, that this absolute monarch limited the succession to heirs male by "pragmatic sanction"; that is to say, by his own unsupported order. The Act in itself was irregular; it was never put before the Cortes, and the Council of Castile protested ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... The pragmatic value of this idea is that it introduces a much needed refinement into the ancient controversy about nature and nurture, innate quality and environment. For the pseudo-environment is a hybrid compounded of "human nature" and "conditions." To my mind it shows the uselessness of pontificating ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Lecture on Bergson and his anti- intellectualism, in A Pluralistic Universe. It may be remarked here that, although James hailed Bergson as an ally, Bergson cannot be classed as a pragmatist. His great assertion is that just because intellect is pragmatic it does not help us to get a vision of reality. Cf. the interesting work on William James and Henri Bergson, by W. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Thomas More (when a student on his travels) is said to have puzzled a pragmatic professor at Bruges, who gave a universal challenge to dispute with any person in any science: in omni scibili, et de quolibet ente. Upon which Mr. More sent him this question, 'Utrum averia carucae, capta in vetito namio, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... it, the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational. To choose the first view under such circumstances would be an ascetic act, an act of philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be guilty. Using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts, I had shown the concept of the absolute to MEAN nothing but the holiday giver, the banisher of cosmic fear. One's objective deliverance, when one says 'the absolute exists,' amounted, on my showing, just to this, that 'some justification ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... uncle of Mabel Dunham in Cooper's Pathfinder (1849). He is a sea-captain who insists in sailing a vessel upon the great northern lakes as he would upon the Atlantic, but, despite his pragmatic self-conceit, is nonplussed by ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Middle East. Britain separated out a semi-autonomous region of Transjordan from Palestine in the early 1920s, and the area gained its independence in 1946; it adopted the name of Jordan in 1950. The country's long-time ruler was King HUSSEIN (1953-99). A pragmatic leader, he successfully navigated competing pressures from the major powers (US, USSR, and UK), various Arab states, Israel, and a large internal Palestinian population, despite several wars and coup attempts. In 1989 he reinstituted parliamentary elections and gradual political liberalization; ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... mistress here; but, from the moment thou didst enter the portal of Cedric's house, 'twas thou became mistress, thou—thou mistress of my home, and heart as well; thou wilt accept the former mission, and I will fight with all of cupid's weapons until thou dost accept the latter. 'Tis a pragmatic duty to follow my words and understand them and demean thyself accordingly. To-night thou wilt come to the drawing-room at the prandium hour, and 'twill be my pleasure to seat thee at table, and 'twould be best if ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... that we may be wrong. Is it possible that the laugh is not the test of the joke? Here is a question over which the philosophers may wrangle. Is there an Absolute in the realm of humor, or must our jokes be judged solely by the pragmatic test? Congreve once told Colly Gibber that there were many witty speeches in one of Colly's plays, and many that looked witty, yet were not really what they seemed at first sight! So a joke is not to be recognized even by its appearance or by the company ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... to remove, returning the Old Testament to a state of textual purity with emendations drawn from sources as varied as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Psalms, the Antiquities of Josephus, the Chaldee Paraphrases, the books of Philo. His pragmatic purpose was to nullify the biblical criticism of historical minded scholars as reputable as Grotius, to render useless the allegorical interpretation of messianic prophecies. That is, he saw in the latter a "pernicious" absence of fact, a "weak and enthusiastical" whimsy, unchristian ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... consider the three leaders of the pragmatic movement to be Professor William James, Dr. F. C. S. Schiller, and Professor John Dewey. The first has developed his doctrine at length in his volume entitled "Pragmatism" (London, 1907); the second, who calls his doctrine "Humanism," but declares ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... outline to the Congress in the weeks ahead represent a reaffirmation, not an abdication, of Federal responsibility. They represent a pragmatic rededication to social compassion and national excellence, in place of the combination of good intentions and fuzzy follow-through which too often in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... gave our crown prince his first actual sight and experience of the facts of war. Stanislaus is overwhelmingly the favourite candidate, supported, too, by France. The other candidate, August of Saxony, secures the kaiser's favour by promise of support to his Pragmatic Sanction; and the appearance of Russian troops secures "freedom of election" and choice of August by the electors who are not absent. August is crowned, and Poland in a flame. Friedrich Wilhelm cares not for Polish elections, but, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... responsibility will depend upon the insertion of extraneous factors into the formula of consent. The pragmatic test has been and will be the probability that the correction of the somatic or psychic condition would have prevented or will prevent the consent to the crime. As long as no such condition will be demonstrable, society for its own protection ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... He was thrown into a life of controversy, and thus into all the terrible temptations—worse than the temptations to whoredom or wine—that accompany a life of controversy. The three scoundrels that fell upon Valiant at the mouth of the lane were Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatic. In other words, the besetting temptations of many men who are set as defenders of the truth in religion, as well as in other matters, is to be wild-headed, inconsiderate, self-conceited, and intolerably ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... bizarre, the morbid in Wedekind are more than redeemed by his rich humanity. He loves his fellow man even when he castigates him. He is very emotional, also pragmatic. The second act of his Franziska, a Karnevalgroteske, was given at the Dresden Pressfestival, February 7, 1913, with the title of Matrimony in the Year 2000, the author and his wife appearing in the leading roles with brilliant success. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... longing eyes upon Italy, Zeno gave a hesitating approval to the advance of the last great Gothic host to the southwest. The first had taken this direction under Alaric eighty-eight years before. Now a sovereign sanction from the senate of Constantinople, called a Pragmatic sanction, assigned Italy to the ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... receiving, in recompense, the dignity of archbishop of Seville. Two years later, when the grand master of the order of Santiago died, Ferdinand had himself elected without difficulty. [Footnote: Maurenbrecher, Studien und Skizzen, 54.] Some time after this Isabella issued a pragmatic decree, declaring that the grand masterships of the orders should always be annexed to crown. These dignities were of great value; not only did they bring in a princely income, but they practically extended the estates and patronage of the crown by all the broad lands, cities, and villages, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... time, Pragmatism came to the rescue from the philosophical camp; but the assault was but a very short one; since, tested by Pragmatic methods (that is, the testing of the truth of a religion by its appeal to human consciousness), if one fact stood out luminous and undisputed, it was that the Catholic Religion, with its eternal appeal in every century and to ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... first proposed to repair to these subjects, a suitor for their protection, the gray-headed politicians of her court had, it seems, assured her that she could not possibly succeed; that the Hungarians, when the Pragmatic Sanction had been proposed to them by her father, had declared that they were accustomed to be governed only by men; and that they would seize the opportunity of withdrawing from her rule, and from their allegiance to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... sword were speedily wrested from him by the adroitness of the politician; in an interview with Leo X. at Bologna, Francois bartered the liberties of the Gallican Church for shadowy advantages in Italy. The 'Pragmatic Sanction of Bourgea', which now for nearly a century had secured to the Church of France independence in the choice of her chief officers, was replaced by a concordat, whereby the King allowed the papacy once more ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... chinks or lockhole, I am presently on the bones of him. If a friend comes, I make him sit down by me on a form or chest. The rest may walk, a God's name!" There has been seldom a better portrait of the pragmatic conceit and self-importance of a small man ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott |
