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 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 shades of meaning.  “Therefore,” said I to myself, “it is equally inadmissible to exclude either affirmation.”