Daily Inspiration Quote by James F. Cooper

Cooper’s line snaps like a ruler on a knuckle: not a vague moral complaint, but a claim of near-scientific predictability. “Ever” and “mathematical” do the heavy lifting. He’s not arguing that ignorance sometimes accompanies superstition; he’s insisting on a dependable ratio, as if you could plot a society’s knowledge gaps on a graph and watch magical thinking rise in lockstep. That’s a novelist borrowing the authority of Enlightenment language to make a cultural diagnosis feel objective, almost embarrassingly measurable.

The subtext is less about individual foolishness than about social conditions. Superstition isn’t presented as exotic folklore; it’s a byproduct of withheld education, uneven access to information, and the human need to make patterns when institutions fail to explain the world. Cooper wrote in an America still building its public schooling, still negotiating the boundaries between Protestant moral order, frontier rumor, and emerging scientific confidence. In that setting, “superstition” also reads as a proxy battle over who gets to define truth: preachers, pamphleteers, politicians, or the new class of secular experts.

The phrasing carries a faintly patrician edge. Calling the relationship “mathematical” implies that belief is not just wrong but mechanically produced, which flatters the speaker’s own rational stance while reducing believers to predictable outcomes. It’s effective because it’s cold. Cooper isn’t pleading; he’s diagnosing, and the chill of certainty is the persuasion.