The organic vision of Hélan Jaworski

When he was a child, his father—who incidentally could not resist a bargain—had bought a copy of Lavater’s Physiognomy off a barrow and the young Jaworski had read and been fascinated by it. So he was accustomed to divide the face into zones and found no difficulty in correlating the digestive system with the mouth and the reptiles, or the nose with the birds and the respiratory system.

From this beginning he worked out, over the years, a scientific and comprehensive biological plan. Going, in the first place, to the works of the great French physiologist Claude Bernard, whose definition of life as an incessant movement of assimilation and disassimilation Dr Jaworski amplified, he said that: “All life is characterized by two specific movements, ceaseless, slow, varied and simultaneous, of exteriorisation and interiorisation.’ That is to say that life can be reduced to vibratory oscillations in two directions, one that comes from the subject and one that goes towards the subject. All vital rhythms are embraced by this dictum.

Interiorisation is a movement of ingestion which assimilates the solids, liquids and gases of space, while exteriorisation is a movement of excretion, reproduction, expiration, a movement which tends to throw out into space a part of the being or the being itself The double movement of respiration, contrary and complementary, gives a precise idea of the principle of the movements of exteriorisation and interiorisation.

In the two great divisions of life, the vegetable kingdom is dominated by exteriorisation, the typical growth pattern being in a straight line upwards and downwards and segmented. The animal kingdom is dominated by interiorisation which gets progressively more pronounced as we proceed up the Biological Tree, until we reach man, the most interiorised and individualised of all the species.

The variations in forms are governed by the different functions which themselves spring from locomotor activity. This rule is always confirmed throughout life. Mastication is a movement, excretion a movement, birth a movement. In order to explain this more fully let us look at the primitive unicellular animal—the amoeba.