With respect to the copula the following quotation from the “Principles” of Logic (p. 10) may serve: “Judgment proper is the _act_ which refers the ideal content (recognized as such) to the reality beyond the act.” In other words, judgment as act (and it is the act which is expressed in the copula) must always fall outside of the content of knowledge as such; yet since this act certainly falls within reality, it would have to be recognized and stated by any knowledge pretending to competency with respect to reality as a whole. These considerations, stated in this way, are highly technical and presuppose a knowledge not merely of Mr. Bradley’s own logic, but also of the logical analysis of knowledge initiated by Kant and carried on by Herbart, Lotze, and others. Their main import may, however, be stated in comparatively non-technical form. Human experience is full of discrepancies. Were experience purely a matter of brute existence (such as we sometimes imagine the animals’ experience to be) it would be totally lacking in meaning and there would be no problems, no thinking, no occasion for thinking, and hence no philosophy. On the other hand, if experience were a complete, tight-jointed union of existence and meaning, there would be no dissatisfaction, no problems, no cause for efforts to patch up defects and contradictions. Existences, things, would embody all the meanings that they suggest; while abstract meanings, values that are _merely_ ideal, that are projected or thought of but not fulfilled, would be totally unheard of. But our experience stands in marked contrast to both these types of experience. It is neither an affair of meaningless existence nor of existence self-luminous with fulfilled meaning. All things that we experience have _some_ meaning, but that meaning is always so partially embodied in things that we cannot rest in them. They point beyond themselves; they indicate meanings which they do not fulfil; they suggest values which they fail to embody, and when we go to other things for the fruition of what is denied, we either find the same situation of division over again, or we find even more positive disappointment and frustration--we find contrary meanings set up. Now all thinking grows out of this discrepancy between existence and the meaning which it partially embodies and partially refuses, which it suggests but declines to express. Yet thinking, the mode of bringing existence and meaning into harmony with each other, always works by selection, by abstraction; it sets up and projects meanings which are ideal only, footless, in the air, matters of thought only, not of sentiency or immediate existence. It emphasizes the ideal of a completed union of existence and meaning, but is helpless to effect it. And this helplessness (according to Mr. Bradley) is not due to external pressure but to the very structure of thought itself.