The Bicycle of Jaime de Magalhães Lima

Abstract

Jaime de Magalhães Lima is the first divulger of Tolstoyism in Portugal and, in the works published in the last decade of the 19th century, he develops a relentless diagnosis of the finissecular decadence, identifying the capital errors of the Century in the materialism prevailing in society and in the divorce between nature and man. In the context of a rigorous and uncompromising neo-franciscanism, the author of The Vegetarianism and Morality of the Races (Oporto, 1912) comes to consider the sport exemplary of the crisis of values of a society that "languishes and dies because it lacks the belief in a higher destiny".