r. Not only does
the stronger side score a more signal victory, and the losing side
suffer a more painful and humiliating defeat, in proportion as the
pecuniary gain and loss in the wager is large; although this alone is
a consideration of material weight. But the wager is commonly laid also
with a view, not avowed in words nor even recognized in set terms in
petto, to enhancing the chances of success for the contestant on which
it is laid. It is felt that substance and solicitude expended to
this end can not go for naught in the issue. There is here a special
manifestation of the instinct of workmanship, backed by an even more
manifest sense that the animistic congruity of things must decide for a
victorious outcome for the side in whose behalf the propensity inherent
in events has been propitiated and fortified by so much of conative
and kinetic urging. This incentive to the wager expresses itself freely
under the form of backing one's favorite in any contest, and it is
unmistakably a predatory feature. It is as ancillary to the predaceous
impulse proper that the belief in luck expresses itself in a wager. So
that it may be set down that in so far as the belief in luck comes
to expression in the form of laying a wager, it is to be accounted an
integral element of the predatory type of character. The belief is, in
its elements, an archaic habit which belongs substantially to early,
undifferentiated human nature; but when this belief is helped out by the
predatory emulative impulse, and so is differentiated into the specific
form of the gambling habit, it is, in this higher-developed and specific
form, to be classed as a trait of the barbarian character.

The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the sequence
of phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions, it is of very
serious importance for the economic efficiency of any community in which
it prevails to an appreciable extent. So much so as to warrant a more
detailed discussion of its origin and content and of the bearing of its
various ramifications upon economic structure and function, as well as
a discussion of the relation of the leisure class to its growth,
differentiation, and persistence. In the developed, integrated form
in which it is most readily observed in the barbarian of the predatory
culture or in the sporting man of modern communities, the belief
comprises at least two distinguishable elements--which are to be taken
as two differ