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Cause of 'altruism'.  Men have on the whole spoken of love with such emphasis and so idolised it because they have had little of it and have never been allowed to eat their fill of this food: thus it became for them 'food of the gods'. Let a poet depict a utopia in which there obtains universal love, he will certainly have to describe a painful and ludicrous state of affairs the like of which the earth has never yet seen  everyone worshipped, encumbered and desired, not by one lover, as happens now, but by thousands, indeed by everyone else, as the result of an uncontrollable drive which would then be as greatly execrated and cursed as selfishness had been in former times; and the poets in that state of things  provided they were left alone long enough to write  would dream of nothing but the happy, loveless past, of divine selfishness, of how it was once possible to be alone, undisturbed, unloved, hated, despised on earth, and whatever else may characterise the utter baseness of the dear animal world in which we live.