Pasteur, much perplexed, resolved to put the case before his colleagues, and did so two days later. He spoke of Bernard’s silence, his abstention from any allusion at their weekly meetings. “It seems to me almost impossible,” he said, “and I wonder that those who are publishing these notes have not perceived that it is a very delicate thing to take upon oneself, with no authorization from the author, the making public of private notebooks! Which of us would care to think it might be done to him!... Bernard must have put before himself that leading idea, that I was in the wrong on every point, and taken that method of preparing the subject he intended to study.” Such was also the opinion of those who remembered that Claude Bernard’s advice invariably was that every theory should be doubted at first and only trusted when found capable of resisting objections and attacks. “If then, in the intimacy of conversation with his friends and the yet more intimate secret of notes put down on paper and carefully put away, Claude Bernard develops a plan of research with a view to judging of a theory--if he imagines experiments--he is resolved not to speak about it until those experiments have been clearly checked; we should therefore not take from his notes the most expressly formulated propositions without reminding ourselves that all that was but a project, and that he meant to go once again through the experiments he had already made.” Pasteur declared himself ready to answer any one who would defend those experiments which he looked upon as doubtful, erroneous, or wrongly interpreted. “In the opposite case,” he said, “out of respect for Claude Bernard’s memory, I will repeat his experiments before discussing them.”