8. What is Mortal in Man?

Thus, in our memory, we are actually given something that leads us to the otherwise unknown concepts of the spiritual process by which an immortal separates from the mortal, so that we have to recognize it. And so it appears to us in something else in the spiritual research process that we must, as it were, take hold of ourselves more strongly, so that the powers of comprehension expand beyond that which would otherwise receive no attention, in order to enter the spiritual world. For example, we can hold up an ideal to ourselves that is yet to be achieved, that is just as absent in the present as a past experience. Then we also stand in a purely spiritual process to this ideal. The materialist will indeed lose himself with a kind of voluptuousness in a certain impasse; he will want the soul to have a physical relationship to an ideal. But the real relationship to an ideal is a purely spiritual one. Only those who know that memory is also a purely spiritual process can understand this.