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.