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Pragmatic   Listen
noun
Pragmatic  n.  
1.
One skilled in affairs. "My attorney and solicitor too; a fine pragmatic."
2.
A solemn public ordinance or decree. "A royal pragmatic was accordingly passed."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pragmatic" Quotes from Famous Books



... corruptions he single-handedly planned 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" ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins

... 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Daoism (Taoism), Buddhism, Muslim 2%-3%, Christian 1% (est.) note: officially atheist, but traditionally pragmatic ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... were inevitable. When war becomes the trade of a separate class it is natural that they 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, ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine

... the following: 1. Genealogies, like the records of Manetho, the Egyptian priest. 2. The chronicle, following the chronological order, and telling the story in a simple, popular way. 3. The "pragmatic" form of writing, which aims to explain by reference to the past some particular characteristic or phase of the present, and uses history to point a special moral lesson. 4. The form of history which traces the rise and progress of "ideas," tendencies, or ruling forces,—such as the idea of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... proud to 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 and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... symbolical ornament. He had formed a correct notion of the 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., ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... 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, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... true: it worked. But the weakness of Pragmatism is that most theories will work if you put your back into making them work, provided they have some point of contact with human nature. Hedonism will pass the pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up to a certain point every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy works in Russia and Democracy in America; Atheism works in France, Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... 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 out the palpable steps by which the past became again ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... 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 that it has increased the sum of ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but for the constant reader 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 feel, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... 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 workers to pay more heed to the life that ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... it even worse," she said softly. Marian had a pleasant voice, throaty and low, that sounded intimate even when talking about something pragmatic. "I wish we could ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... alert to check every outbreak of individuality. Do ladies aspire to ride bicycles? Or wear bloomers? There is the small boy to face. It is a question for him. Conciliate him, and you may laugh at the pragmatic. His, too, is a healthy barbarism, beneficent in its action, that thinks scorn of eyeglasses and spectacles, and leads him to denounce quadruple vision, as, indeed, all departure from the simplicities of physical perfection. A human scarecrow he ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... other characteristic he was my father's direct antithesis—my father, whose faith approximated that of a Sioux warrior. "I take things as they come," was one of his sayings. He was not concerned with the theories of Evolution, the Pragmatic Philosophy or any other formal system of learning or ethics. With him the present was filled with duties, the remote past or the distant future was of indifferent concern. To deal justly and to leave the world a little better than he found it, was ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... been one of Barstein's fellow-councillors in Zionism, a pragmatic inexhaustible debater in the small back room, and the voluble little man now loomed suddenly large as a possible authority upon ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... speculatively it was most 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 own consciousness of itself. The soul's consciousness is the 'idea' or 'representation' ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... and chattels, of that moral corporation, the New Zealand trading and emigration company, which so liberally salaries him with L.600 per annum for the use of his "principle?" Again, who so fitted as the renowned Rowland Hill, the very prig pragmatic of pretension, for the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, or First Lord of the Treasury if you will? A man who could contrive a scheme for annihilating some two millions of post-office revenue at one stroke, must be qualified beyond all other pretenders for dealing with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... "pragmatism" 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 know them." ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer

... 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. In 1989 he resumed parliamentary elections ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... longer hangs over its waters. Now that all the prairie and plain have been occupied, the mystery has fled entirely from the valley or has hidden itself in the wilderness and "bad lands." All is translated into the values of a matter- of-fact, pragmatic, industrial occupation. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... 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 ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... follow pretty plainly the stages of the progress from a limited to an absolute monarchy. By an act dated the 10th of January 1661, entitled "Instrument, or pragmatic sanction," of the king's hereditary right to the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, it was declared that all the prerogatives of majesty, and "all regalia as an absolute sovereign lord," had been made over to the king. Yet, even after the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... that there is a great satisfaction in the pragmatic accomplishment, and—" he was saying when we came out of the woods onto the southern slope, where lie the long rows of peas, which are making Sam's fortune. He got them in by working two days and all one night in a bright spell in mid-February, ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess

... prudent doctor of canon law did not, however, altogether lose sight of the temporal concerns of the priesthood. He proffered an urgent request for the restoration of canonical elections, laying the growth of heresy altogether to the account of the abrogation of the Pragmatic Sanction by the Concordat in 1517. The sanction being re-established, "the detestable and damnable sects, the execrable and accursed heresies of to-day" would incontinently flee from the church. If he painted the portrait of the prelate elected by the suffrages of his diocese in somewhat too nattering ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... gave to the public. Vigneul-Marville, in his Melanges d'Histoire et de Litterature, relates that he found the two following lines at the end of the "Decrees of Basle and Bourges," published under the title of "Pragmatic Sanction," with a Commentary by Come Guymier,—Andre Brocard's ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various

... 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 ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... Cromwell, starting up and addressing Pearson, "thou hast not touched Mark Everard, in whom there was no guilt, for he was deceived by him who passed between us—neither hast thou put forth thy hand on the pragmatic Presbyterian minister, to have all those of their classes cry sacrilege, and alienate ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... knowledge, all questions that deal with the formal aspect of thinking do not 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 ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... a preacher; but a faith evermore emphasised and deeper rooted in Emily's mind by her incapacity to acquiesce in the stiff, pragmatic teaching, the narrow prejudice, of the Calvinists of Haworth. Yet this very Calvinism influenced her ideas, this doctrine she so passionately rejected, calling herself a disciple of the tolerant and thoughtful Frederick Maurice, and writing, in defiance of its flames and shriekings, the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... Bigot, the most accomplished knave in Canada, yet indispensable for his vigor and executive skill; Bougainville, who had disarmed the jealousy of Vaudreuil, and now stood high in his good graces; and the Adjutant-General, Montreuil, clearly a vain and pragmatic personage, who, having come to Canada with Dieskau the year before, thought it behooved him to give the General the advantage of his experience. "I like M. de Montcalm very much," he writes to the minister, "and will do the impossible to deserve his confidence. I have spoken to ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... Theresa had 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... breaking the alliance of the Four Powers, which left her isolated in Europe; and she saw at last a chance of breaking this league in the difficulties of the House of Austria. The Emperor Charles the Sixth was without a son. He had issued a Pragmatic Sanction by which he provided that his hereditary dominions should descend unbroken to his daughter, Maria Theresa, but no European state had as yet consented to guarantee her succession. Spain seized on this opportunity of detaching the Emperor from the Western powers. She promised to support ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green

... evening, so that she did not enjoy them as much as she would, had she been less voracious in her appetite, and they made her complain grievously of the dulness of the latter part of Russell's Modern Europe, which was being read in the schoolroom, and yawn nearly as much as Phyllis over the 'Pragmatic Sanction.' However, when that book was concluded, and they began Palgrave's Anglo Saxons, Lily was seized within a sudden historical fever. She could hardly wait till one o'clock, before she settled herself at the schoolroom table with her work, and summoned every one, ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge

... for a very justifiable refusal. He was very clever 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 getting gray, and who was generally insignificant ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... 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 with their environments, or else go under, so in the ethical world it was all a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... himself had cast 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

... 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 ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... with dread—thy mind with illusions—thy bosom with groans. Know that when thou neglectest my counsels, the gods will refuse their aid. Dare, then, to affranchise thyself from the trammels of superstition, my self-conceited, pragmatic rival, who mistakes my rights; renounce those empty theories, which are usurpers of my privileges; return under the dominion of my laws, which, however severe, are mild in comparison with those of bigotry. It is in my empire alone that true ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... Cigar Makers' Union, was neither so purely American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently idealistic. On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and "pragmatic." The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies, particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen's Association, the "First Internationale," which was founded by Karl ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various

... 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 even recognize, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... 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 against it ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... become united to France. Lorraine belonged to Duke Francis, the husband of Maria Theresa, eldest daughter to the Emperor, and Francis received instead the duchy of Tuscany; while all the chief Powers in Europe agreed to the so-called Pragmatic Sanction, by which Charles decreed that Maria Theresa should inherit Austria and Hungary and the other hereditary states on her father's death, to the exclusion of the daughters of his elder brother, Joseph. When Charles VI. died, however, in 1740, ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge

... sweetish smell and the window which gave on the black hulk of the ailantus tree. From behind a screen, which was covered with faded wall paper, the figure of the doctor emerged while they waited, an ample middle-aged man, with the air of having got into his clothes in a hurry and the face of a pragmatic philosopher. He motioned commandingly for them to approach; and going to the other side of the screen, they found the dying woman gazing ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... aversion to assembling the States General, i. 12; consents to abrogate the Pragmatic Sanction, i. 32; subsequently re-enacts it, i. 33; confirms the privileges of La ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... intent like Samuel Pepys to put money in his purse, in order to 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 ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. With the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it left nothing ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... 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 ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... 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 time to do thus, was for that the captains were gone out ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan

... Encroachment: 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 ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... find? As soon as we get a whisper of civilization in Greece, we find Daedalus successful in flying. The pragmatic interpreters pretend that the fable does but point to the discovery of sails for ships; but I put it to you, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... 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 ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... to teach 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 ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller

... thus be seen that by the logical application of a few simple and easily apprehended principles Professor Prawling has built up a great edifice of practical economics, which, whether we regard it in its subliminal or its pragmatic aspects, cannot fail to have influence on the dynamics of ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various

... of Germany, upon whose death, on the 9th of October, his eldest daughter, Maria-Theresa, in virtue of the Pragmatic Sanction, instantly succeeded ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... is the part which the 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 ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... Encyclopaedists. Each doctrine tends to direct human activity towards a definite object; but the activity of man reacts upon the doctrine, transforms it and adapts it to new requirements, or overcomes it. Doctrine therefore should be an act of life and not an academy of words. In this lie the pragmatic veins of Fascism, its will to power, its will to be, its position with regard to "violence" and ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... fundamental desires. Since it carries with it a strong and ever present desire in this way, it is strikingly dynamic in nature. It dominates all social organization, and with primitive people it dominates much of the conduct of the individual. When such a motive is seriously entertained it is pragmatic, i. e., it serves a useful end, or at least the conceptions which it embodies are entertained because they are thought to be of the highest value ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II

... teachers have had a deep sense of the power of evil in human life. Jesus apparently was not interested in the philosophical question of the origin of evil, but accepted the fact of evil in a pragmatic way, and saw his own life as a conflict with ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... the conquest of Silesia, one of the richest provinces of the Austrian empire. It belonged to Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, daughter of the late emperor of Germany, whose succession was guaranteed by virtue of the Pragmatic Sanction—a law which the Emperor Charles passed respecting his daughter's claim, and which claim was recognized by the old king of Prussia, and ratified by all the leading powers of Europe. Without a declaration of ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... German business, and England is mixed up in it only because her present king is a Hanoverian and not an Englishman. This is the matter as far as I can make it out. Charles VI., Emperor of Germany, died in October, 1740. It had been arranged by a sort of general agreement called the Pragmatic Sanction —" ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty

... 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 oracles ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... 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 ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... very high in her Anti-Pragmatic notions—there had been, for eight months past; and it went on, fiercely enough, doggedly enough, on both sides for Six Years more, till 1748, when the general Finis came. War of which we propose to say almost nothing; but ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... 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 in possession of the entire country. East Friesland had already been absorbed the year before on ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... pragmatic and eclectic; most important elements of religion are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; about 2-3% ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... However, growth has not been strong enough to lower South Africa's high unemployment rate, and daunting economic problems remain from the apartheid era - especially poverty and lack of economic empowerment among the disadvantaged groups. South African economic policy is fiscally conservative, but pragmatic, focusing on targeting inflation and liberalizing trade as means to increase job ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... 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 every type of ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... their deadliness. Then instantly, irrepressibly, comes the lightning-flash of horror to our heart, to our muscles, to our lungs, to get ready to meet this emergency. Then, and not till then, do we really feel the emotion. In fact, our most pragmatic philosopher, William James, has gone so far as to declare that emotions are the after-echoes of muscular contractions. By the time an emotion has fairly got us in its grip so that we are really conscious of it, the blood-supply ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... it (if the little transaction deserves so high-sounding a name) was, in every sense of the words, strictly necessary. Julia Wentworth had resided for years with her grandfather, a pragmatic old gentleman, to whom from pure affection she had long yielded an obedience which he would have had no right to extort, and which he was sometimes disposed to abuse. He had declared in the most ingenuous manner that she should never marry with his consent any man of less fortune ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... of the Imperative of morality is more difficult. As categorical, it presupposes nothing else to rest its necessity upon; while by way of experience, it can never be made out to be more than a prudential precept—i.e., a pragmatic or hypothetic principle. Its possibility must therefore be established a priori. But the difficulty will then appear no matter of wonder, when it is remembered (from the Critique of Pure Reason) how hard it is to establish ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... 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 what he calls a "real mathematician," ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan



Words linked to "Pragmatic" :   matter-of-fact, hard-nosed, hardheaded, pragmatism



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