"The dog gives but the cat is." What does it mean?

Question

What does the author mean with "The dog gives but the cat is"? The part I don't understand is the cat part. It's from "Cats and Dogs" by H. P. Lovecraft.

Altogether, we may see that the dog appeals to those primitive emotional souls whose chief demands on the universe are for meaningless affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and subservience; whilst the cat reigns among those more contemplative and imaginative spirits who ask of the universe only the objective sight of poignant, ethereal beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried, and impersonal order and sufficiency. The dog gives, but the cat is.

Answer 1

Think about how we normally think about cats and dogs.

Dogs, we think of as loyal, always there - man's best friend. We throw the ball, they run to fetch. We call, they come. We ask, they do. The dog gives - does what we ask, gives their service. Think of the people we describe as a dog - people who prostrate themselves before another, begging to continue in their service. (For the record, I'm a dog person, though cats are also nice.)

Cats, on the other hand, we think of as kind of - sassy? independently minded, certainly. Where we we would throw a dog a ball to fetch, we'd never do such a thing with a cat lest we get a disdaining look. Cats are stereotypically free-willed and in pursuit of their "own thing". They don't give, like a dog. They just kind of are. Think of the people we describe as "catty" - cunning, and you never are quite sure what they are thinking - and certainly not someone who serves you.

Dogs give, but the cat is.

Answer 2

It might be clearer if you reorganise the passage a little.

The dog gives "meaningless affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and subservience".

The cat is "[an] objective sight of poignant, ethereal beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried, and impersonal order and sufficiency".

Answer 3

Normally ‘is’ (like other forms of ‘to be’) expects a complement after it, like “The cat is quiet”. The complement can be implicit from context, like “The dog isn’t quiet, but the cat is.” But ‘is’ can also be used with no complement at all, to mean ‘exists’. It’s a quite unusual construction, generally only used for a strong rhetorical effect; the most famous example is Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” In speech it would usually be marked by emphasis on the word ‘is’, to show that the unusual phrasing is deliberate, not an incomplete sentence.

So here it means “The cat exists” — in contrast with the dog, its character comes from its innate properties, not its interactions with us.