350 Conclusion 
Conclusion 
As the reader who has followed us thus far has al- 
ready noted, there are three new hypotheses or three new 
fundamental conceptions which we submit to the judg- 
ment of biologists and of positive philosophers in general. 
Although they support one another mutually and all rest 
upon the same general idea of the vital phenometion, they 
are, nevertheless, independent of one another, especially 
the first two are independent of the third. 
The first is the hypothesis of centro-epigenesis to 
which we, as was said in the preface and explained in the 
first chapter, were led by the fundamental biogenetic law 
of the repetition of phylogeny by ontogeny with all its 
more or less mediate or immediate results. 
The second hypothesis is that according to which each 
specific nervous current deposits a very definite substance 
which, in its turn, is capable of provoking again exclu- 
sively the same specificity of current as that by which it 
was itself deposited. This idea has enabled us on the one 
hand with the aid of the centro-epigenetic hypothesis to 
explain directly the inheritance of acquired characters; 
and has on the other hand by itself alone afforded the 
immediate explanation of all the mnemonic phenomena in 
the widest sense of the word, from histologic specializa- 
tion, in consequence of which the cells answer always 
only in the same accustomed way to the most different 
accidental stimuli, up to the psycho-mnemonic phenom- 
ena or phenomena of memory properly so called. 
Uber die Bedeutung der Kernteilungsfiguren, Leipzig, Engelmann, 
1883, P. 18, Gesamm. Abhandl. Bd. II, P. 142. — Marcus Hartog: 
The Dual Force of the Dividing Cell, Part I: The Achromatic Spin- 
dle Figure illustrated by Magnetic Chains of Force, from the Pro- 
ceedings of the Royal Society, B, Vol. 76, 1905, especially P. 555—559. 
