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.
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