Essays in scientific synthesis / by Eugenio Rignano.

  • Eugenio Rignano
Date:
[1918]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Essays in scientific synthesis / by Eugenio Rignano. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    bring support to the epigenetic hypothesis ?—-these are questions which we cannot here discuss, and to which time alone can give an adequate answer, which in any case would be premature at the present stage of investigation. The mere allusion here made to them will have sufficed, we hope, to complete this rapid sketch of the centro-epigenetic hypothesis, before passing on to the questions of another order which it raises. II Nervous Energy and its Mnemic Property Having thus traced the broad features of the centro- epigenetic hypothesis, and having shown its agreement with the principal facts of observation and experiment, I have now to show its connection with the widest biological questions, and with certain fundamental questions of organic chemistry and energetics. We know how the phenomenon of the recapitulation of phylogenesis by ontogenesis-—which I have just derived directly from the centro-epigenetic hypothesis—- has been considered from the outset as a phenomenon of mnemic nature. Starting from this first fact, we have been gradually led, especially by the work of Hering and Semon, to make of memory the general and fundamental function of all living matter. This drawing together of ontogenesis and the pheno¬ menon of memory, these extensions to all living sub¬ stance in general of this mnemic faculty, although based
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