desire for good exists, though it’s in a childish form, and honesty you may find, although there are crowds of brigands. Anyway, there’s no practicality. Practicality goes well
“I don’t agree with you,” Pyotr Petrovitch replied, with evident enjoyment. “Of course, people do get carried away and make mistakes, but one must have indulgence; those mistakes are merely evidence of enthusiasm for the cause and of abnormal external environment. If little has been done, the time has been but short; of means I will not speak. It’s my personal view, if you care to know, that something has been accomplished already. New valuable ideas, new valuable works are circulating in the place of our old dreamy and romantic authors. Literature is taking a maturer form, many injurious prejudices have been rooted up and turned into ridicule. … 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.