In a word, we have cut ourselves off irrevocably from the past, and that, to my thinking, is a great thing..." "He's learnt it by heart to show off!" Raskolnikov pronounced suddenly.
"What ?" asked Pyotr Petrovitch, not catching his words; but he received no reply.
"That's all true," Zossimov hastened to interpose.
"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 neighbour,' 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 neighbour 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.