The organic vision of Hélan Jaworski

The amoeba is composed of a cell filled with protoplasm and a nucleus. In order to move, it exteriorises part of its protoplasm into a long extension called a pseudopodium. It fixes the point of the pseudopodium and, by drawing the rest of the cell towards the fixed point—it moves. In the process of moving it engulfs sea water and food particles which are broken down in the protoplasm and excreted. Movement has originated the functions of ingestion and excretion.

Where exteriorisation predominates the cells live alone as unicellular animals, but when interiorisation becomes more pronounced the cells join together to form a colony. As interiorisation becomes still more pronounced, the colonies join together to form an organism of a higher degree—a colony of colonies. A muscle is composed of colonies of muscle cells, a bone of colonies of bone cells. The liver is an organ, but a complicated one because it contains vessels and nerves which are organs in their own right. Cells, tissues, organs represent three degrees of colony formation, and man himself is seen as the fourth degreea colony of organs. These organs Dr Jaworski sees as essentially corresponding to different creatures of the outside world. To emphasise this essential point of his work I will give you his own words:

‘The organisms in space and the organs of our body are not separate and different notes, but are the same notes differently adapted’—that is to say ‘there is a total, absolute and essential correspondence between the separate living beings in space and the organs of our body. We can even say that they are the same and that the enormous differences which increase as we ascend the biological tree are only of a secondary order, apparent rather than real, and due on the one hand to adaptation to free exterior life and on the other to adaptation to life in colonies. The organs are prisoners within the colony.’

The white blood corpuscle resembles the amoeba and in man there is still a correspondence to vegetable structure in the cartilaginous and connective tissues which recalls the colonial mass of the myxomycetes—little mushrooms who live among the damp leaves in the depth of the forest. Like the encapsulated cysts in our cartilaginous tissue, the myxomycetes—free in

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