to invidious success. Both
also have a high aesthetic value. Both are fostered by the pecuniary
culture. But both alike are of no use for the purposes of the collective
life.

Chapter Eleven ~~ The Belief in Luck

The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the barbarian
temperament. It is a concomitant variation of character of almost
universal prevalence among sporting men and among men given to warlike
and emulative activities generally. This trait also has a direct
economic value. It is recognized to be a hindrance to the highest
industrial efficiency of the aggregate in any community where it
prevails in an appreciable degree. The gambling proclivity is doubtfully
to be classed as a feature belonging exclusively to the predatory type
of human nature. The chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in
luck; and this belief is apparently traceable, at least in its elements,
to a stage in human evolution antedating the predatory culture. It may
well have been under the predatory culture that the belief in luck was
developed into the form in which it is present, as the chief element of
the gambling proclivity, in the sporting temperament. It probably owes
the specific form under which it occurs in the modern culture to the
predatory discipline. But the belief in luck is in substance a habit
of more ancient date than the predatory culture. It is one form of the
artistic apprehension of things. The belief seems to be a trait carried
over in substance from an earlier phase into the barbarian culture,
and transmuted and transmitted through that culture to a later stage
of human development under a specific form imposed by the predatory
discipline. But in any case, it is to be taken as an archaic trait,
inherited from a more or less remote past, more or less incompatible
with the requirements of the modern industrial process, and more or less
of a hindrance to the fullest efficiency of the collective economic life
of the present.

While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it is not
the only element that enters into the habit of betting. Betting on the
issue of contests of strength and skill proceeds on a further motive,
without which the belief in luck would scarcely come in as a prominent
feature of sporting life. This further motive is the desire of the
anticipated winner, or the partisan of the anticipated winning side, to
heighten his side's ascendency at the cost of the lose