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 agency" here carries no further
implication as to the nature of the agency spoken of as
preternatural.
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