What is Life? (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrödinger

The ethical law in its simplest general form (be unselfish!) is plainly a fact, it is there, it is agreed upon even by the vast majority of those who do not very often keep it. I regard its puzzling existence as an indication of our being in the beginning of a biological transformation from an egoistic to an altruistic general attitude, of man being about to become an animal social. For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species; in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish. Phylogenetically much older state-formers as the bees, ants and termites have given up egoism completely. However, its next stage, national egoism or briefly nationalism, is still in full swing with them. A worker bee that goes astray to the wrong hive is murdered without hesitation. Now in man something is, so it seems, on the way that is not infrequent. Above the first modification clear traces of a second one in similar direction are noticeable long before the first is even nearly achieved. Though we are still pretty vigorous egoists, many of us begin to see that nationalism too is a vice that ought to be given up. Here perhaps something very strange may make its appearance. The second step, the pacification of the struggle of peoples, may be facilitated by the fact that the first step is far from being achieved, so that egoistic motives still have a vigorous ap...

Altruism is next step from egoism.