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Nowhere in the lower forms of animal life, so far as we know, is there the slightest indication of the gambling instinct.
The monkey, the elephant, love whiskey, and easily become drunkards.
The passion for alcohol seems innate in animal life; even the wise ant can be readily induced to disgrace himself if alcohol is put near him.
For all the human weaknesses and mainsprings—ambition, affection, vanity, drunkenness, ferocity, greediness, cunning—we can find beginnings among the lower animals.
But man appears to have evolved from within himself the gambling instinct for his own especial damnation.
Where did the instinct come from? Why was it planted in us?
Like every other instinct with which intelligent nature endows us, it must have its good purpose, and it must not be judged merely in the corrupted form in which we study it at Monte Carlo or in Wall Street.
Perhaps the spirit of gambling is really only an atrophied, perverted form of the spirit of adventure.
Columbus staked his life and gambled, when he started across the water.