ent phases of the same fundamental habit of thought, or as
the same psychological factor in two successive phases of its evolution.
The fact that these two elements are successive phases of the same
general line of growth of belief does not hinder their coexisting in the
habits of thought of any given individual. The more primitive form
(or the more archaic phase) is an incipient animistic belief, or an
animistic sense of relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal
character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously
consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal
individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather
of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect
events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and
chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate
animism. It applies to objects and situations, often in a very vague
way; but it is usually so far defined as to imply the possibility of
propitiating, or of deceiving and cajoling, or otherwise disturbing the
holding of propensities resident in the objects which constitute the
apparatus and accessories of any game of skill or chance. There are few
sporting men who are not in the habit of wearing charms or talismans to
which more or less of efficacy is felt to belong. And the proportion is
not much less of those who instinctively dread the "hoodooing" of the
contestants or the apparatus engaged in any contest on which they lay a
wager; or who feel that the fact of their backing a given contestant or
side in the game does and ought to strengthen that side; or to whom the
"mascot" which they cultivate means something more than a jest.

In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense of an
inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or situations. Objects or
events have a propensity to eventuate in a given end, whether this end
or objective point of the sequence is conceived to be fortuitously given
or deliberately sought. From this simple animism the belief shades off
by insensible gradations into the second, derivative form or phase above
referred to, which is a more or less articulate belief in an inscrutable
preternatural agency. The preternatural agency works through the visible
objects with which it is associated, but is not identified with these
objects in point of individuality. The use of the term "preternatural
ag