As the third division, alongside the other two and equally independent,
are to be understood all those things in the social organism which are
connected with mental and spiritual life. The term "spiritual culture,"
or "everything that is connected with mental and spiritual life,"
is scarcely a term that accurately describes it in any way. Perhaps
one might more accurately express it as "Everything that rests on the
natural endowments of each single human being--everything that plays
a part in the body social on the ground of the natural endowments,
both spiritual and physical, of the individual."
The first function,--the economic one,--has to do with everything
that must exist in order that man may keep straight in his material
adjustments to the world around him. The second function has to do
with whatever must exist in the body social because of men's personal
relations to one another. The third function has to do with all that
must spring from the personal individuality of each human being,
and must be incorporated as personal individuality in the body social.
The more true it is that our social life has of recent years taken its
stamp from modern technical industry and modern capitalism, the more
necessary it is, that the injury thus unavoidably done to the body
social should be healed by bringing man, and man's communal life, into
right relation to these three systems of the body social. Economic
life has, in recent times, singly and of itself, taken on quite
new forms. And because it has worked all alone, unbalanced, it has
asserted undue power and preponderance in human life. The two other
branches of social life have not until now been in a position to work
themselves in this matter-of-course way into the social organism and
become incorporated with it according to their own proper laws. Here
man must step in, with the instinctive sense I spoke of, and set to
work to evolve the threefold order, each individual working on the
spot and at the spot where he happens to be. To attempt to solve the
social problem in the way meant here, will leave not one individual
without his task, now and in the days that are coming.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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