which they may be founded. In fact, I
find in my memory many examples favorable to those masters. Thus, I
have seen many nurses lose their temper and still use the higher tones
of their voice; and, on the other hand, I also remark (and the remark is
important) a certain form, the appellative form, where all the
characters agree without exception in producing the greatest intensity
possible upon the high notes.

The professors of singing triumph, for they find in this appellative
form, always and necessarily sharp and boisterous at the same time, a
striking confirmation of their system. Here I seem to stray far from the
solution which I thought I already grasped! Far from it; the light is
breaking. Hitherto the examples evoked had only increased my obscurity
by their multiplicity, and I saw nothing in all these remarks but a
series of contradictions whence it seemed impossible to deduce anything
but confusion, into which I found myself plunged.

But was this confusion really in the facts which I examined, or was it
not rather the creation of my own mind? Now, in the matter of principle,
the weakness of individual reason has been too often proved to me to
allow of my attaching any other cause to the contradictions which block
my path and force me to confess my ignorance. I will not, then, here cry
_mea culpa_ for myself or for others to justify that ignorance or excuse
its confession. It must be acknowledged that God knows what He does, and
His omnipotence is assuredly guiltless of the divagations which an
impotent mind finds it convenient to attribute to it.

Now, let others in the blindness of proud reason, forget this truth,
which they contest even by opposing to it the quibbles for which
free-thinkers are never at a loss, and to escape the confusion which
they inevitably derive from the ill-studied work of the Supreme Artist.
Let them venture to attribute to it their own darkness. For my part, I
shall not thereby lose my conviction that all which seems to me
disordered or contradictory in the expression of the facts which I
question, is only apparent and only exist in my own brain.

The profound obscurity into which light plunges us does not prevent the
light from being; and the chaos of ideas which, most generally, results
from our examination of things, proves nothing against the harmonies of
their constitution.

The pebble virtually contains the spark, but we must know how to produce
it. Thus the phenomena of