nature contain luminous lessons, but we must
know how to make them speak; and, what is more, understand their
language. Now, I would add, the spirit of God is inherent in all things;
and this spirit should, at a given moment, flash its splendors in the
eyes of an intellect alike submissive, attentive, patient and suppliant.

Moreover, does not the Gospel show us the way to fertilize
investigations such as those to which I have given my life? Does it not
say: "Knock and it shall be opened, ask and it shall be given?" Then
what must I do to find my way out of the maze in which my reason
wanders? What must I do in presence of the contradictions which
nevertheless must needs contain a fecund principle? Finally, what must I
do in order to see light break from the very heart of those obscurities
wherein light is lost?

I will seek anew, night and day, if needful; I will knock incessantly at
the door of the facts which I desire to examine. I will descend into the
secret depths of their organism; there I will patiently question every
phenomenon, every organ, and I will entreat their Author to divulge to
me their purpose, their relations and their very object.

Well! It is thus that those men, proud of their vain knowledge, were
made dizzy by the splendor of that same light which they thought that
they could subject to their investigations, and the blindness which has
fallen upon them is the punishment which God is content to inflict upon
them in this world.

Having said this, where was I in my investigations? Ah! it was here.

The memory of the high inflections invariably affected by the women whom
I had seen on the previous day, caressing their infants, struck me with
the more force that I had learned from my masters that law which had
hitherto ruled uncontested, and now underwent a refutation which
demonstrated the falsity of its applications with a clearness and
minuteness which left no room for doubt.

The examples in virtue of which I saw the errors of my masters,
unanimously proclaimed the tenuity of the voice to be in proportion to
its acuteness.

Now this formula is, in letter as in spirit, the reverse of the
prescription upon which, by a caprice whose cause I have just explained,
all the masters of art agree.

I then perceived that my first affirmations were no better founded than
those of the masters, whose theories I had attacked. The truth of the
matter is that ascending progressions may arise from opposite