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 spirit." "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, however 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 your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, 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 egoist? 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,[13] or children as yet without mind, there is no fatherland and no patriotism. 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 innumerable 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.