Polypragmatism

"Why interfere with a self-limited condition unless some unusual feature, a danger sign, makes its appearance? Polypragmatism was always ridiculous. Is it not polypragmatism if we do something useless, unnecessary, uncalled for?"

"It would appear, on the whole, that the country is going through a very natural transition-period after the blossoming-time from Bellman to Runeberg, and that the present or recent literary activity is mainly on the surface, and of no particular importance. Perhaps this might be said of the parallel movements in more countries than one, or two, or three. 'Even the literary polypragmatism of Strindberg, as of other contemporary writers, is a “sign."

"Its prima facie presence can be immediately grasped in the controlled critical judgments of a Polybius or a Plutarch or a Sophocles attempting to penetrate to the causes of the most dense phenomenon, human polypragmatism. It is present in equal measure in Demosthenes' oration, "On the Crown," and in the Roman Pantheon, where the syntax of word and stone is stretched into ever larger and more complex architectonic units with such ease and skill and daring that the spectator can move effortlessly from part to whole and back again without either moral or aesthetic vertigo."

"Further, Balzac's polypragmatism on the one hand, and that tendency to careful and official preservation of all business documents which the French have inherited from their Roman lords on the other, made it pretty certain that fresh matter would turn up."