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Updated: June 14, 2025
The lofty man; wanted several requisites for being a Marlborough; wanted a Sarah Jennings, as the preliminary of all! We will not attend the lazy movements and procedures of the Pragmatic Army farther; which were of altogether futile character, even in the temporary Gazetteer estimate; and are to be valued at zero, and left charitably in oblivion by a pious posterity.
That had been, and was still, Stair's fine idea; but D'Ahremberg had disapproved the methods. D'Ahremberg, it seems, is rather given to opposing Stair; and there rise uncertainties, in this Pragmatic Army: certain only hitherto the Magazine in Hanau. The old Kur-Mainz, namely, had just died; and there was a new "Chief Spiritual Kurfurst" to be elected by the Canons there.
The real gainer by the Thirty Years' War had been neither France nor Austria, but Sweden. The real gainer by the war of the Pragmatic Sanction had been neither France nor Austria, but the upstart of Brandenburg. France had made great efforts, had added largely to her military glory, and largely to her public burdens; and for what end? Merely that Frederic might rule Silesia.
This was all the Fighting that King George got of his Pragmatic Army; the gain from conquest made by it was, That it victoriously struggled back to its bread-cupboard. Stair, about two months hence, in the mere loitering and higgling that there was, quitted the Pragmatic; magnanimously silent on his many wrongs and disgusts, desirous only of "returning to the plough," as he expressed himself.
If, however, it be urged that pragmatic truths never grow absolutely true at all, and that the most prolonged pragmatic tests do not exclude the possibility of an ultimate error in the idea, there is no difficulty about admitting this. The pragmatic test yields practical, and not 'absolute, certainty.
In the latter case, as in the philosophy of M. Bergson, all past reality might constantly lie open to retentive intuition, a form of knowledge soaring quite over the head of any pragmatic method or pragmatic "truth." It looks, indeed, as if the history of at least personal experience were commonly taken for granted by pragmatists, as a basis on which to rear their method.
Beneficent Treaty of Vienna was at last achieved; Treaty and Treaties there, which brought matters to their old bearing again, Austria united with the Sea-Powers, Pragmatic Sanction accepted by them, subsidies again to be expected from them; Baby Carlos fitted with his Apanages, in some tolerable manner; and the Problem, with which Creation had groaned for some twenty years past, finally accomplished better or worse.
On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and "pragmatic."
The Deputies from France I do not mention; nor from Spain, nor from Austria. Their task seemed easy to the sanguine mind. The Kaiser has agreed with Spain in the Italian-Apanage matter; with the Sea-Powers in regard to his Ostend Company, which is abolished forever: what then is to prevent a speedy progress, and glad conclusion? The Pragmatic Sanction.
For the believer, Caesar must of course really exist; for the pragmatist critic he need not, for the pragmatic deliverance belongs, as I have just said, to another universe of discourse altogether. When one argues by substituting definition for definition, one needs to stay in the same universe.
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