character shades off into the character of a religious devotee. Where
the betting man's animistic sense is helped out by a somewhat consistent
tradition, it has developed into a more or less articulate belief in
a preternatural or hyperphysical agency, with something of an
anthropomorphic content. And where this is the case, there is commonly
a perceptible inclination to make terms with the preternatural agency
by some approved method of approach and conciliation. This element of
propitiation and cajoling has much in common with the crasser forms
of worship--if not in historical derivation, at least in actual
psychological content. It obviously shades off in unbroken continuity
into what is recognized as superstitious practice and belief, and so
asserts its claim to kinship with the grosser anthropomorphic cults.
The sporting or gambling temperament, then, comprises some of the
substantial psychological elements that go to make a believer in creeds
and an observer of devout forms, the chief point of coincidence being
the belief in an inscrutable propensity or a preternatural interposition
in the sequence of events. For the purpose of the gambling practice the
belief in preternatural agency may be, and ordinarily is, less closely
formulated, especially as regards the habits of thought and the scheme
of life imputed to the preternatural agent; or, in other words, as
regards his moral character and his purposes in interfering in events.
With respect to the individuality or personality of the agency whose
presence as luck, or chance, or hoodoo, or mascot, etc., he feels and
sometimes dreads and endeavors to evade, the sporting man's views are
also less specific, less integrated and differentiated. The basis of his
gambling activity is, in great measure, simply an instinctive sense
of the presence of a pervasive extraphysical and arbitrary force or
propensity in things or situations, which is scarcely recognized as a
personal agent. The betting man is not infrequently both a believer
in luck, in this naive sense, and at the same time a pretty staunch
adherent of some form of accepted creed. He is especially prone to
accept so much of the creed as concerts the inscrutable power and the
arbitrary habits of the divinity which has won his confidence. In such a
case he is possessed of two, or sometimes more than two, distinguishable
phases of animism. Indeed, the complete series of successive phases of
animistic belief is to be found unbroken in the spiritual furniture
of any sporting community. Such a chain of animistic conceptions will
comprise the most elementary form of an instinctive sense of luck and
chance and fortuitous necessity at one end of the series, together with
the perfectly developed anthropomorphic divinity at the other end, with
all intervening stages of integration. Coupled with these beliefs in
preternatural agency goes an instinctive shaping of conduct to conform
with the surmised requirements of the lucky chance on the one hand,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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