myers@uwmacc.UUCP (Jeff Myers) (02/27/85)
From *Crime and Punishment*:
"Isn't it so?" Pyotr Petrovitch went on, glancing affably at Zossimov.
"You must admit," he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of triumph
and superciliousness -- he almost added "young man" -- "that there is an
advance, or, as they say now, progress in the name of science and economic
truth..."
"A commonplace."
"No, not a commonplace! Hitherto, for instance, if I were told, `love thy
neighbor', what came of it?" Pyotr Petrovitch went on, perhaps with excessive
haste. "It came to my tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbor and
we both were left half naked. As a Russian proverb has it, `Catch several
hares and you won't catch one'. Science now tells us, love yourself before all
men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest. You love yourself and
manage your own affairs properly and your coat remains whole. Economic truth
adds that the better private affairs are organised in society -- the more whole
coats, so to say -- the firmer are its foundations and the better is the common
welfare organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively
for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass
my neighbor's getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not from private,
personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance. The idea is
simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by
idealism and sentimentality. And yet it would seem to want very little wit to
perceive it..."
"Excuse me, I've very little wit myself," Razumihin cut in sharply, "and so
let us drop it. I began this discussion with an object, but I've grown so sick
during the last three years of this chattering to amuse oneself, of this
incessant flow of commonplaces, always the same, that, by Jove, I blush even
when other people talk like that. You are in a hurry, no doubt, to exhibit
your acquirements; and I don't blame you, that's quite pardonable. I only
wanted to find out what sort of man you are, for so many unscrupulous people
have got hold of the progressive cause of late and have so distorted in their
own interests everything they touched, that the whole cause has been dragged
in the mire. That's enough!"
--
Jeff Myers The views above may or may not
University of Wisconsin-Madison reflect the views of anyone other
Madison Academic Computing Center than Petrovitch and Razumihin.
ARPA: uwmacc!myers@wisc-rsch.arpa
uucp: ..!{ucbvax,allegra,heurikon,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!myers