  In “The Gain from a Belief” Cooper takes on English and French progressivism and positivism of the 19th century (Mill, Comte, and others) using these figures’ organic metaphors and visions of cultural development to explore the debates about racial uplift, the so-called Negro problem, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and universal brotherhood. She presents the reader with a philosophical antagonist—a solitary figure with a cold, intellectual eye, pallid check, and harrowed brow. He represents  “Speculative unbelief, curiously and sneeringly watching the  humdrum, common-place, bread-and-butter toil of unspeculative belief” (VAJC, 188). This thinker—with his speculative unbelief, skepticism, positivism, and agnosticism, is juxtaposed with “struggling, working, believing humanity” that holds unscientific faith. Confronting the imagined philosophical figure Cooper states, “Sir…Your philosophy, I presume, lifts you above the toils and anxieties, the ambitions and aspirations of the common herd. Pardon me, but do you not feel called to devote those superior powers of yours to the uplifting of your less favored brotheren?” (VAJC, 188).