The same is true of the encouragement given to the growth of "college spirit," college athletics, and the like, in the higher institutions of learning.
These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be classed under the head of exploit.

They are partly simple and unreflected expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess.
Sports of all kinds are of the same general character, including prize-fights, bull-fights, athletics, shooting, angling, yachting, and games of skill, even where the element of destructive physical efficiency is not an obtrusive feature.

Sports shade off from the basis of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its being possible to draw a line at any point.

The ground of an addiction to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution--the possession of the predatory emulative propensity in a relatively high potency, a strong proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is especially pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage specifically called sportsmanship.
It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of, that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish temperament.

The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature.