But my memory, as if to confirm this principle, and to show its contrast with the custom admitted by those gentlemen, suggests to me other instances derived from the same source.  Let a mother be angry with her child and threaten him with punishment; she instantly assumes a grave tone which she strives to render powerful and intense.  Here, then, on the one hand (and nature proclaims it), the voice decreases in intensity in proportion as it rises higher; and, on the other hand, it increases in proportion as it sinks.  This double fact, undeniably established, constitutes an unanswerable argument against the system in question.  But it is not, therefore, necessarily its radical and absolute refutation.  No, doubtless, whatever may be the significance and the number of the facts opposed to the directions of those gentlemen, these facts do not seem to exclude exceptions upon 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.