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Updated: May 18, 2025
The copula is the sign denoting that there is an affirmation or denial, and thereby enabling the hearer or reader to distinguish a proposition from any other kind of discourse. Dismissing, for the present, the copula, of which more will be said hereafter, every proposition, then, consists of at least two names—brings together two names, in a particular manner.
To speak in the language of grammarians, the copula is that of symbolic relationship, not that of existence; or, to speak in the language of the street, 'is' here means, as it often does, 'represents. How could it mean anything else, when Christ sat there in His body, and His blood was in His veins? What, then, is the teaching of this symbol?
It MAY be that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the copula AND. They might even come and go without those other parts suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration.
When, as in mathematics, important consequences seem to follow from them, such really follow from the tacit assumption, through the ambiguity of the copula, of the real existence of the object named. Accidental propositions may be called real; they add to our knowledge.
The word which thus serves the purpose of a sign of predication is called, as we formerly observed, the copula. It is important that there should be no indistinctness in our conception of the nature and office of the copula; for confused notions respecting it are among the causes which have spread mysticism over the field of logic, and perverted its speculations into logomachies.
The terms are connected by the copula. God is the world, and the world is God. This is the truth of being, for the monist. The two principles are merged in one, and the contradiction solved by an assertion of the identity of the contradictories. Monism takes two forms. It may be either materialist or spiritual. One term must be selected as the reality, and the other written off as an illusion.
And this may also be added, that women, generally, are not so strong as men, nor so wise or prudent; nor have so much reason and ingenuity in ordering affairs; which shows that thereby the faculties are hindered in operations. How to beget a male or female child; and of the Embryo and perfect Birth; and the fittest time for the copula.
Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves? And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant cubes that under it they lay as well I did not doubt. There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae between it and the circled shields.
That the employment of it as a copula does not necessarily include the affirmation of existence, appears from such a proposition as this, A centaur is a fiction of the poets; where it can not possibly be implied that a centaur exists, since the proposition itself expressly asserts that the thing has no real existence.
It arises from the ambiguity of the copula, which, in addition to its proper office of a mark to show that an assertion is made, is also, as we have formerly remarked, a concrete word connoting existence.
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