The philosophy of sport / by P. McBride.

  • Peter McBride
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The philosophy of sport / by P. McBride. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    although the insufficiency of his mount may spare the neophyte this last but also least example. The spirit so engendered will be just the opposite of compassionate, and we all admire compassion. Again, the sport will have become so much a matter of course that its prose- cution will lose some of the glamour which at first accompanied it. Compare the position with that of a youth whose opportunities have been hitherto restricted and who later finds himself in a position to gratify his long suppressed instinct. How he will enjoy his first successes with rod or gun and his first day’s hunting provided mishaps have not been too numerous ! Moreover, his character will have been formed, and the necessary brutalities associated with the sports will tend less to produce callousness. He will have the advantages of education, of experience gained at school and during the years he has lived, to counteract what in the young child may leave permanent effects, which no doubt in later life may be softened and perhaps even eradicated. It is at school that the young are as a rule for the first time inoculated with a taste for games which are based upon competition. They may, of course, have had a little of this element in the home environment if they have been members of a large family, or, failing this, have been fortunate enough to have had a sufficient number of playmates, but at school they will find competition in an organised form. On his entry into this new world every lad will realise that an era has begun for him quite different from anything he has previously experienced. If it entails leaving home as well as being thrown suddenly into a heterogeneous medley of his fellows, the experience will be all the more poignant. It will hit hardest the only child, while
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