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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

they have remained standing before it, unbelieving
and without knowledge. But, as you, my dear reader,
are at least not a full-blooded Jew,--for such a one
will not go astray as far as this,--we will still go
along a bit of road together, till perhaps you too turn
your back on me because I laugh in your face.

If somebody told you you were altogether spirit,

you would take hold of your body and not believe
him, but answer: " I have a spirit, no doubt, but do
not exist only as spirit, but am a man with a body."
You would still distinguish yourself from "your spi-
rit." '' But," replies he, " it is your destiny, even
though now you are yet going about in the fetters of
the body, to be one day a ' blessed spirit,' and, how-
ever you may conceive of the future aspect of your
spirit, so much is yet certain, that in death you will
put off this body and yet keep yourself, i. e. your
spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your spirit is the
eternal and true in you, the body only a dwelling here
below, which you may leave and perhaps exchange for
another."

Now you believe him ! For the present, indeed,

you are not spirit only; but, when you emigrate from
the mortal body, as one day you must, then you will
have to help yourself without the body, and therefore
it is needful that you be prudent and care in time for
your proper self. " What should it profit a man if he
gained the whole world and yet suffered damage in
his soul ? "

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course

of time against the tenets of the Christian faith, have
long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 37

your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet un-
disturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one
truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the
spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else.
Despite all your atheism, in zeal against egoism you
concur with the believers in immortality.

But whom do you think of under the name of ego-

ist ? A man who, instead of living to an idea,--i. e.
a spiritual thing--and sacrificing to it his personal
advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot, e. g.,
brings his sacrifice to the altar of the fatherland; but
it cannot be disputed that the fatherland is an idea,
since for beasts incapable of mind,* or children as yet
without mind, there is no fatherland and no patriot-
ism. Now, if any one does not approve himself as a
good patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to
the fatherland. And so the matter stands in innumer-
able other cases: he who in human society takes the
benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the
idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed
as an egoist against the idea of liberty,--etc.

You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual

in the background as compared with the personal, and
has his eyes on himself where you would like to see
him act to favor an idea. The distinction between
you is that he makes himself the central point, but
you the spirit; or that you cut your identity in two

* [The reader will remember (it is to be hoped he has never forgotten)
that " mind" and "spirit" are one and the same word in German. For se-
veral pages back the connection of the discourse has seemed to require the
almost exclusive use of the translation "spirit," but to complete the sense
it has often been necessary that the reader recall the thought of its iden-
tity with " mind," as stated in a previous note.]