18 March 2026
Threefolding. "If the social organism of mankind is to become sound again it must be fashioned in the likeness of man’s own true being. Now the entity known as man is threefold and consists of body, soul, and spirit—a trilogy that functions in thinking, feeling, and willing, each of which funds expression through man’s physical organism. Thought is governed by the sense-nerves situated in the head; feeling by the process of breathing, by the rhythmic beat of the pulses, and its centre is the chest; while the will is intimately bound up with the process of metabolism in the abdominal regions, and finds its expression also in man’s extremities--in his limbs.
This threefold organism of man, as recognized by Spiritual Science, also belongs to Humanity’s Social Organism; for even as the threefold division of life in man—thinking, feeling, and willing—finds expression in three different portions of his body, so, too, the spiritual activity, the economic productivity, and the system of law and equity ought each to be separately located in separate self-governing members of the Social Organism...
Now, curious though this may at first sight seem, it is the head’s thinking—an intellectual activity—that corresponds to the process functioning in economics in the social organism, when we compare the individual with the State; while feeling, connected with heart, corresponds to the State’s judicial life; and the Will or the metabolism of the Individual is paralleled by the spiritual life of the State. In this order of correspondence we have to recognize a complete reversal of what might be expected. ..."
From Luther to Steiner by Ernst Boldt (1923).