The practice of gambling is thus exhibited as a deliberate reversion to those passions and that mental attitude which characterise the savage or pre-human man in his conduct and his outlook. There lurk in “civilised” man the remnants of survivals of countless ages of pre-human and of savage heredity, anarchic passions associated with barbarous superstitions. The order of civilisation claims to have killed or atrophied the grosser forms of these atavistic tendencies, but many of them are not dead; social control and education of individual habits keeps them in subordination or acquiescence, but on temptation they are ready to awake. Just as war and certain forms of sport can call from the caverns of heredity brutish traits whose presence was utterly unknown to their possessors, so the interest of gambling discovers in many natures a similarly fatal inheritance. Maeterlinck has recently sought to find a quasi-rational basis for “luck” in the occasional revival of certain primitive instincts of self-protection which, seldom needed in the higher progress of humanity, have died down and rarely assert themselves. Whether such latent powers of extra-rational warning exist or ever did exist, we need not here discuss; it is, however, quite evident that the widespread belief in “luck” among gamblers is a reversion to a form of unreason which carries no sound instinct of direction with it. It is fair to adduce this belief in luck as an important testimony to the derationalising influences of gambling. It does not seem true that the gambling habit pervades only or chiefly the least intelligent types of men. Among habitual gamblers on the stock exchange, on the turf and in the card-room, and wherever skill tempers chance, high degrees of cunning, memory, and judgment are often found, while certain qualities of determination and of self-command are conducive to success. But while many men possessing these qualities are drawn to games or business pursuits where a strong element of chance is present, there is no real affinity between any of these personal powers and pure gambling. It is not, for instance, true that skill, judgment, or self-command is of the least assistance at the roulette-table or at rouge-et-noir. The fact that these qualities are so commonly regarded as serviceable to the player may be cited as a conspicuous evidence of the derationalising influence of gambling even in the case of those who do not gamble. For in reality they are only useful in proportion as the game is not pure gambling.