Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Part 10

Our choice then seems to be between Watson copying the newspaper clipping incorrectly (I a.s.sume here that the newspaper would not make such a large mistake as to misstate the day of the week of a recent crime) which allows the A Study in Scarlet narrative to remain as written, or to imagine that given Watson's "pledge to secrecy" in the Band case, he made it seem as if the events of A Study in Scarlet occurred prior to the events of "Speckled Band." The second seems plausible given that in The Sign of the Four Holmes does not point out the factual error of the day of the week, instead objecting to the "romantic" element as unnecessary.

If Only We Could Ask the Book. Or Holmes.

Perhaps it's because it's impossible to "separate the sensational from the criminal" ("Adventure of the Cardboard Box") that Holmes's attempts to be his own chronicler come across just as adventurous as when Watson writing. After all, the stories must be written such that they "may interest the reader" ("Adventure of the Blanched Soldier"). Complain as he might, Holmes refrained from simply advancing from the data to the conclusion, preferring instead to mimic Watson's method of keeping the reasoning process hidden until the case has been solved.

"Blanched Soldier" even includes the cla.s.sic Holmes trick of telling another about his background in an astounding case of observation. If Holmes truly wrote this tale, it no doubt would be far more straightforward. We do see something more like a Holmesian reticence in "Adventure of the Lion's Mane," the 'other' Holmes narrated tale. Therein Holmes admits to his own slowness in determining the cause of death, and refuses to accept the thanks of those involved. So what are we to make of "Blanched Soldier" and the third-person narrated "Mazarin Stone," "Last Bow," and the Utah chapters of A Study in Scarlet? None of these seem to match the methods and style of Watson and it seems unlikely that Holmes would have written them in the manner given. Perhaps they are, like Pseudo-Platonic writings, early attempts to write in the literary style of another. Early pastiche pieces, so to speak.

All of this confusion points back to a shortcoming of texts that no doubt you have already experienced in reading this volume. In many ways written texts are inferior to a person recounting an event or telling a story. Indeed, Socrates in the Phaedrus explains that a problem with writing is that it stands in "solemn silence" when questioned (line 275d). Thus it can be difficult to find truth through writing because the writings are not able to defend themselves against attacks, always in need of a "father's support" but remaining alone (line 275e). Similarly when we try to unravel some of these problems in the Holmes's stories, we have no proper audience to ask. The texts themselves cannot respond to our queries, and careful examination leads to more confusion. Given that our narrator is obscuring facts and s.h.i.+fting both times and locations, we are faced with an even more insurmountable task than Socrates had envisioned. Further, as Watson and Holmes are clearly pseudonyms, we lack even the ability to know for certain who it is that we wish to question. (If only we knew Watson's real name we might be able to track down his original notes and thus solve some of the problems.) No Holmes-related puzzle is perhaps more needing of an honest interlocutor than the question of Watson's wives. While he clearly had at least two, some Holmes scholars have placed the number as high as six! How marvelous it would be to simply ask the texts a question and get an answer, but alas it is not to be. The best we can hope for is to attempt to use our reasoning process to discern the answer to this and other puzzles. I will therefore leave the puzzle of enumerating Watson's wives to the reader, though I will helpfully point out that Watson wife is visiting her mother in "Five Orange Pips," that Mary Morstan's mother is dead in The Sign of the Four, in "Blanched Soldier" Watson is with his wife, and that Holmes knew of Watson's "sad bereavement" in "Empty House." That should be enough of a start to work out the puzzle for yourself. Or at least to become puzzled.

But It Is Not Deduction!

But it is just at the process of reasoning that we begin to have problems. Throughout the corpus of Holmes adventures we are continually informed that he is doing deduction. Indeed, in the "Science of Deduction" chapter of A Study in Scarlet, we read a reprint of Holmes's "Book of Life" wherein he refers to "The Science of Deduction and a.n.a.lysis." But of course, as demonstrated elsewhere in this tome you are now reading, Holmes is (generally) not utilizing deduction itself in his reasoning. With few exceptions, Holmes is utilizing inductive reasoning, or more precisely in most instances abductive reasoning. Induction is probabilistic reasoning wherein more information can change the strength of the conclusion. Deductive reasoning involves an argumentative structure such that in valid deductions the conclusion follows with certainty from the premises. No additional information can change the valid deduction to an invalid deduction, whereas more information can either strengthen or weaken the conclusion of an inductive argument.

This distinction is one which philosophers are more apt to make than non-philosophers, and we might be inclined to forgive Watson's use of the wrong term as his usage does conform with how physicians and scientists tend to use the term. For non-philosophers, we utilize deduction if we move toward a particular conclusion from a larger set of possibilities. Yet, Holmes's use of the term is puzzling. Certainly we read early on that Holmes had no knowledge of philosophy (A Study in Scarlet), or more precisely "Nil." But this flies in the face of Holmes's later spending his retirement years studying agriculture and philosophy (Preface, His Last Bow). Of course it's always possible that someone as interested in precision would late in life come to find solace in the theoretical purity of philosophy, so this might well be a dead end. (Or indeed, it could be the case that Watson's early list of Holmes's shortcomings was based upon Holmes's own playing a prank on his new friend and flat mate.) Even if we grant Holmes's general ignorance of things philosophical, it would seem odd indeed for Holmes not to know the works on logic done by John Stuart Mill and C.S. Peirce. Mill's System of Logic was published in London in 1843-nearly forty years before Watson and Holmes meet. In Mill's amazing advancement of inductive logic he explains various approaches that have come to be known as Mill's Methods. Consider for a moment this description of the Method of Residues: "Subducting from any given phenomenon all the portions which, by virtue of preceding inductions, can be a.s.signed to known causes, the remainder will be the effect of the antecedents which had been overlooked, or of which the effect was as yet an unknown quant.i.ty" (p. 464). Now consider this from The Sign of the Four: "Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth." Or this, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"-this appears first in The Sign of the Four, then throughout the corpus.

Surely Holmes owes a debt to Mill. Mill's writings on inductive reasoning predate Holmes's work, feature systematic a.n.a.lysis on reasoning and determining causes for events, and are in the same vein as Holmes's work in "Book of Life." That Holmes repeatedly uses 'deduction' for 'induction' seems to indicate either that Holmes did not have a grounding in the theory of reasoning-which seems unlikely as he publishes a monograph on the subject-or that someone (Watson? Doyle?) edited Holmes's own work to ensure that a non-philosophically astute readers.h.i.+p would not be confused by a technical difference in terminology between philosophers and the rest of the world.

We could perhaps go so far as to wonder if the American philosopher C.S. Peirce's development of the terminology of 'abduction' to refer to those instances wherein we move from facts to theory was an attempt to smooth over this gap. Peirce's work was being published around the same time as Watson's accounts of Holmes's exploits, so Peirce might have seen his neologism as a way to address this difficulty. Peirce's abduction is one where we "start from the facts, without, at the outset having any particular theory in view, though it is motivated by the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising facts" (p. 137). Slightly later, Peirce notes that "Abduction seeks a theory." It is the job of induction to test that theory. But it remains the case that we can only get certainty from a deduction. Surely with Holmes as interested in reasoning as he was, he would have been keeping current with discussions on the nature of the scientific method and logical reasoning-precisely the topics Peirce is writing on during the time period of Holmes's adventures.

All We Want Is the Truth.

Holmes's own pa.s.sion for discovering the truth took many forms, from the laboratory, to the streets, to reading and writing treatises in the sitting room at 221B Baker Street. This voracious search is in keeping with Plato's remark that "we all ought to be contentiously eager to know what's true and what's false about the things we are talking about" (Gorgias, line 505e). In light of this, we should consider again Watson's list of Holmes's knowledge gaps. Perhaps it's because he has found no need to discuss literature or astronomy that he had not sought out the truth of these subjects. But surely there would be some aspects of these disciplines which could lead a consulting detective to solve a case more quickly. Of course Watson's inclusion of not only literature but also sensational literature complicates matters. Indeed, it seems more and more likely that Watson's early accounting of Holmes's knowledge base is off. So much so that William Baring-Gould quotes Edgar Smith's statement that this list should be "headed by the specification: 1. Knowledge of Sherlock Holmes.-Nil" (Volume 1, p. 156n).

Holmes's own use of abduction reasoning largely operates through the elimination of false possibilities. This is in many respects in agreement with Aristotle's belief that "everything that is true must in every respect agree with itself" (Prior a.n.a.lytics, line47a8). By understanding that no individual truth can be self-contradictory, we can come to understand that an understanding of the larger Truth would involve a larger investigation. This investigation is one in which, for Aristotle, "no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is ama.s.sed" (Metaphysics, lines 993a30993b4).

Here, perhaps, we can see the genius of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes displayed. Each can determine with high probability the cause of a given aspect of the world-from the source of the soil on ones cuffs to the birthplace of a visitor-but also can bring together a vast amount of information such as to draw upon the wisdom of the ma.s.ses in forming a particular conclusion. The Holmes brothers' a.n.a.lytic ability comes from their knack of being able to "ama.s.s" a considerable contribution to our understanding of the truth of the world.

Failing the Truth. Or the Truth in Failing.

Certainly throughout the canonical stories we see many attempts by Holmes to display for Watson what it means to find the truth of a situation. Strangely for a successful physician/scientist, Watson seems to never be able to quite get the hang of the situation. I say strangely because surely Watson's diagnostic ability depends at least in part on the observation of particulars of a patient and placing them together in a meaningful fas.h.i.+on. Indeed, Holmes is greatly worried about Watson's ability to diagnose him at a glance in "The Dying Detective." So we should take seriously that Watson's faults in the stories are not actual faults, but instead faults included in order to throw the serious reader off of the hunt for the truth of the situation. But in all of his carefulness, Watson may have gone a bit too far. Consider the problem of dating the "Disappearance of the Lady Francis Carfax." Unlike the problems raised above in regards to dating the Drebber-Stangerson murders in A Study in Scarlet, here we see issues arising not out of our own a.s.sumption of facts, but from conflicting possibilities.

Consider that the story was first published in 1911, perhaps making it one of the later adventures. Indeed, Watson complains of feeling "rheumatic and old" that seems to point to it being so. But beyond this tidbit, which may be a false signal on Watson's part, we know that Holy Peters's ear was bitten off in a saloon fight in 1889. Further, we know that Watson is not currently married-he was sitting with a woman in a hansom cab, which limits the possibilities somewhat. This case is not one of those provided in "The Golden Pince-Nez" as having occurred in 1894. In 1896 and 1902 we know Watson was not living at Baker Street ("Veiled Lodger," "Blanched Soldier"). So how are we to date this story?

Baring-Gould dates it to July 1902, which we know cannot be correct as Watson was away with a wife at that time. (Though to his credit, Baring-Gould does state that this dating is rather arbitrary.) Jay Christ places the story in 1903, based upon the discovery of a case of a missing "Miss Sophie Francis Hickman, a lady M.D." (emphasis added). This Lady Francis disappeared in August of 1903, and Christ thus believes that he has found both the actual ident.i.ty of Lady Francis Carfax and the date of the adventure. Ernest Zeisler is far more reticent, placing it as occurring in either 1895 or 18971901.

But again, how are we to date this story? It seems as if we both have too little information and too much. Too little in that barring Christ's discovery of a likely case we have nothing external to utilize. And unless we go the way of Baring-Gould and guess, we are apparently left with Zeisler's rather unsatisfactory multiple possibilities. We also have too much in that we have again encounterered the problems of Watson's wives and a singular reference to a date (1889) that may or may not be accurate. Watson has foiled us again.

But in our failure to see how to go forward here, we can see something very telling about the nature of truth. As long as we rely upon external data and coherence with other known facts, we will be hampered by the uncertainty of various aspects surrounding us. To use a far more contemporary example, if we struggled to date a mentioning of the "eight planets of the solar system," we could be dealing with a pre-1930 or a post-2006 statement.

The seventy-odd year reign of Pluto as a planet is something which provides us with information, but only in a circuitous fas.h.i.+on. And indeed, given that many reject Pluto's downgrading we might be tempted to place it in the earlier time frame. There is always the possibility that the speaker misspoke. Or that the statement was edited following the later categorical s.h.i.+fts. Pluto, like Holmes, can vex us in determining the truth of the situation. Surely there is a truth as to how many planets the solar system has. Yet testing a statement against that truth can quite escape us. As we find in "The Red Circle," we are in a situation wherein there is "a ragbag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual."

Is It All Meaningless?

Returning again to the question of Holmes's supposed ignorance of things philosophical, it may well be that given the amount of controversy on matters metaphysical, Holmes had taken an early move toward what Rudolf Carnap would later declare, that the statements of metaphysics were "meaningless," in that metaphysical claims are not statements as they cannot be empirically observable. As seen above, much of the a.n.a.lysis of Holmes that we can do continues to stumble across moments where we cannot go forward. From Watson's deceptions to Doyle's amendments, to lack of information necessary in order to properly place the cases, we may be forced to find that in Holmes we can find little that is certain, observable, or meaningful. Consider also Ludwig Wittgenstein who famously quipped at the close of the Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Holmes, perchance, was a logical empiricist before they had even come into being. But alas, we cannot be certain of that so we ought not speak.

As for the larger question of the truth of Watson's accounts, it seems prudent that we rely upon the advice of Jacques Derrida. In his consideration of truth, Derrida states that "Truth is always that which can be repeated" (p. 246). We can certainly repeat the process of Holmes's induction, and get-with a great amount of probability-the same answers. Further, our continual rereading of the Holmes canon causes us to rethink and reconsider puzzles. Thus, we cannot say that any given number of Watson's wives is true, nor any complete chronology, or even partial dating. But we can say with certainty that Holmes did not wear that fool hat. That is true. We can repeat it. Those who do so should stop falsely imitating the master detective and reasoner par excellence.

Chapter 18.

Dark Rumors and Hereditary Tendencies.

Sawyer J. Lahr.

What Holmes does is poetic. His work as a consulting detective is an art like poetry or sculpture. He can't be confined to the category of forensic detective as we know it from television series today, CSI or Law and Order. The t.i.tle never existed in the late 1800s yet our unofficial poet detective certainly pioneered the occupation in fiction.

In two recent BBC adaptations of the Holmes stories, actors Rupert Everett and Benedict c.u.mberbatch portray the detective as a cryptic poet trapped in the body of a consulting detective. Holmes can see the reflection of criminal artists in the evidence left by their dirty work. It takes a dark imagination to retrace a murder plot. He puts himself in the perpetrators' shoes and asks himself what he would do if he were the criminal. He goes as far as breaking and entering homes, endangering others, and donning disguises to identify with the offender in order to meet him face-to-face, but Holmes's ultimate goal is not always to put someone behind bars. His reckless nature sometimes leads to a criminal's death rather than his arrest, escape, or release.

Like his gay contemporary Oscar Wilde, Holmes lives an artist's life in the realm of ideas. His methods are better thought of as the work of a true artist and aesthete, and Plato might say that Holmes sees only the perfect forms on which all reality is based. That's why Holmes's perceptions are rarely inaccurate whereas his sidekick Dr. John Watson is a philistine who fails to the see the ingenious master plans behind the crimes he helps Holmes investigate. Sherlock Holmes is an aesthetic philosopher and scientist of beauty who can appreciate the poetic nature of things, however perfect or perverse. With his super powers of aesthetic sight, he sees the bigger picture in all the details.

Aestheticism is the science and philosophy of beauty, poetry, and fine arts. The word aesthetics comes from the Greek word aisthsis, meaning perception. A true aesthete as Doyle's contemporary Walter Hamilton defines it in The Aesthetic Movement in England is one who can recognize true beauty and agrees upon standards that govern the perception of what is beautiful.

What makes Holmes, like Wilde, so revered is his ability to see beyond the surface and find connections, meanings, and stories told by clues and circ.u.mstances. Both Holmes and Wilde understand that things are much more than what they seem. Holmes recognizes the most beautifully crafted criminal master plans. He points out flaws and imperfections in the best crimes and never stops searching for the criminal who is a better aesthete than he. It's not surprising that Holmes never marries because he is rarely equaled. In "The Final Problem," Holmes meets his match, Professor James Moriarty, "the Napoleon of crime" who had to resign from a small university in provincial England because of "dark rumors" and "hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind."

And it is these hereditary tendencies that empowers these queer beings of detective fiction with such extraordinary senses for sniffing out criminals or committing their own crimes.

Holmes admits that his brother Mycroft Holmes, "one of the queerest men," has greater powers than his own. Unlike Sherlock, Mycroft lives out all of his days working and lodging in the same few blocks radius and spending leisure time in the unsociable Diogenes club where many London men "some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows." Holmes calls it the "queerest club in London," and Graham Robb writes in Strangers: h.o.m.os.e.xual Love in the Nineteenth Century that the word "queer" had taken on its modern sense by 1894.

The Holmes brothers' grandmother was supposedly the sister of the French painter, Horace Vernet (17891863)-as Holmes says to Watson, "Art in the blood is liable to take the strongest forms."

The work of every artist, including gay artists, relies on superficial details and appearances to convey the deeper messages of their work or, in Holmes's case, to solve a mystery. Holmes detects great criminal minds whose strange motives and queer natures reveal the qualities of aesthetic masterminds whose art Holmes admires and seeks to decode with every mystery he untangles.

A Wilde Guess.

Holmes himself is as queer in every sense of the word as his enemies and clients: his drug habits, s.e.xuality, and supernatural powers of deduction translate into as acute an ability to perceive the true nature of people and things as Oscar Wilde. You may be aware that Holmes was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's mentor Joseph Bell, but it may come as a surprise to learn that Oscar Wilde was also Doyle's inspiration for the character. The two were colleagues and great admirers of each other's writing, and Doyle took Wilde as a muse. The 2010 doc.u.mentary Searching for Sherlock visits the Langham Hotel where, in August 1889, Wilde and Doyle met. Doyle very much looked forward to Wilde's opinion of the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, and a year after their meeting, Doyle's second Holmes story was published in Lippincott's Magazine. According to scholars Graham Robb and Melissa Hope Ditmore, that meeting led to the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott's Magazine as well.

Holmes's super powers of deduction are comparable to and perhaps not so different from Wilde's poetic sense. Wilde stuck up his nose at bourgeois English society the way Holmes belittles the same people for being philistines, and both made critics eat their words. Wilde followed the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement of fine artists and literary figures who endeavored to cultivate, define, and aspire to standards of taste.

Holmes might seem too morbid and sociopathic to be an aesthete, but as Wilde wrote in the preface to Dorian Gray, "No artist has ethical sympathies." He continues, "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." If you look closely, Holmes has an affinity with artists that can't be explained by other theories of who it was that inspired Doyle's creation: Holmes's musical talent with the Stradivarius violin, for instance, and his admiration of androgyny-Irene Adler dons a male disguise to thwart the detective's plan to return a piece of evidence incriminating the King of Bohemia in "A Scandal in Bohemia."

Always at play in the stories and adaptations of Doyle's detective is the likelihood that Holmes may be, like Oscar Wilde, gay. The physical parallels are easy to miss but almost impossible not to see. Doyle's biographer Russell Miller compares Watson's description of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet to Doyle's revered teacher at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, but the physical description incidentally fits Wilde: "six feet," "so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller," "sharp and piercing" eyes, "thin, hawk-like nose," prominent, square chin, and ink-blotted and chemical stained hands. Wilde's hair length is considerably longer and he appears younger than early Sidney Paget ill.u.s.trations of Holmes in Strand Magazine, but in the story of the "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," Holmes a.s.sumes a position Wilde was photographed in and later immortalized as a statue lying against a boulder in Merrion Square, Dublin: they are both lying across a day bed in their housecoat.

Watson mentions another intimate detail, which implicates his own queer sensibilities while insinuating that Holmes's delicate intellectual nature is commonly a.s.sociated with such flamboyant men. Watson calls attention to the frequent occasions he saw Holmes "manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments." It sounds as if his hands were an extension of his aesthetic super-sight, instruments of a philosopher, more than just a detective's dirty fingers.

Sherlock Holmes is a fusion of the two influences in Doyle's life with a strong resemblance to both Bell and Wilde. Doyle's imbuing Holmes with keen aesthetic sense and artistic nature combined with a voracity for science and reason produced one of the most enduring and significant early private eyes.

Graham Robb suggests that the elevated awareness in Holmes is a trait similar to that identified by the first s.e.xologists. These scientists took pleasure in studying "h.o.m.os.e.xualitat"-as least once the German word entered the wider vernacular. They behaved like detectives themselves, investigating into their clients' lives and fellow h.o.m.os.e.xuals. These s.e.xologists, as Robb imagines, philosophized about the nature of h.o.m.os.e.xuals, "What was the secret sense that allowed these alien creatures to recognize one another at a glance and yet remain undetected? Was it innate or acquired? Could a normal person learn to identify them?" The questions are the same as to what gives Holmes his "secret sense" to identify those who demonstrate perverse nature. Edgar Allan Poe's earlier detective Dupin could see through "windows" into the hearts of men, a quality the narrator of "The Murder in the Rue Morgue," Dupin's dandy friend D., chalked up to a "diseased, intelligence" not unlike Professor Moriarty's diabolical hereditary tendencies.

The Aesthete and the Philistine.

Watson's philistine nature makes him curious and practical but not especially clever or insightful. While Holmes tries to minimize his aesthetic sight as "elementary," Watson fails to see what, for Holmes, is self-evident. On a leisurely afternoon in A Study in Scarlet, a bored Watson leafs through a magazine article ent.i.tled "The Book of Life" by none other than Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Watson recalls the gist of the pa.s.sage: It attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way. . . . The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated.

The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man's inmost thoughts.

When he comes to the infamous Holmes's remark "From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other," Watson cries out "What ineffable twaddle!" Without the slightest grain of an aesthetic sense, Watson simply rejects Holmes's preposterous "rules of deduction" theories altogether. When Holmes reveals that he is the author, Watson is taken by surprise. He learns to trust Holmes's "intuition" as the detective calls it in later stories, but this first serious conversation between the new roommates that sets up the dynamic of their relations.h.i.+p for the entire saga.

As Wilde did during his famous libel trial against the Marquis of Queensberry, father of the author's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, Holmes sticks up his nose at bourgeois English society and makes his skeptics eat his words. But unlike Wilde, Holmes was never imprisoned for "unnatural habits, tastes and practices" (otherwise known as sodomy). He rarely curtails his criticism of even the most prominent clients such as the King of Bohemia. Holmes throws around blatantly ugly remarks about his contemporaries, clients, and women, caring little if he offends anyone's philistine nature.

His relations.h.i.+p with Watson is peculiar not only because of the h.o.m.os.e.xual tensions but because Watson's philistine nature and Holmes's aesthetic sense are always at odds. The pair we know and love are polar opposites who debate like philosophers but deeply admire one another. Watson sees Holmes's cigar experiments as the work of a mysterious scientific genius, but, for Holmes, the cigar ash could be the clue to the character of the cigar smoker.

Finding the whereabouts of a criminal's ident.i.ty is easily exposed by Holmes's aesthetic sight but it isn't enough to prove his conviction to the philistines who surround him. He must prove to the police, to the client, or to Watson, using hard evidence or eyewitnesses. Almost every story and adaptation leads us to the conclusion of a mystery, but Holmes always arrives there first in his mind, before Watson or we philistine readers figure it out for ourselves.

That Far-Away Look.

In BBC's The Case of the Silk Stocking, openly gay Rupert Everett, as Holmes, shows up at the London morgue having heard through the grape vine of a recent murder possibly in connection with an aristocratic missing person, Lady Alice, daughter of the d.u.c.h.ess of Narborough. Holmes puts his aesthetic sense to work by noticing that the clothes the victim is dressed in were not her own, and, in fact, belong to a first undiscovered victim. He presses his fingers along the young girl's dead hands as an acupuncturist would check your vital organ functioning. His observations are mostly about Lady Alice's beauty and her well-groomed hands and feet, which later leads him to the conclusion that the killer seeks only flawless and untainted feet to fondle. Though Holmes doesn't blurt out this conclusion early on, the camera reveals the clues. The camera pans past worn dead women's feet before stopping at Lady Alice's body whose feet are well pedicured.

To gather more from the scene of Lady Alice's kidnapping, Holmes requests to see her bedroom. He enters with inspector Lestrade behind, and snaps into what Watson describes as that "vacant expression in his eyes" during his cocaine drug trips. A musical refrain starts playing that we only hear when Holmes is in this trance, hot on the trail of a criminal. We get a private showing of his aesthetic sight as the camera closes in on Holmes's face and our perspective switches to first person. He swiftly scans the room with his eyes and settles on the windowsill. Holmes mounts a bench and slides open the window. He climbs out and within seconds finds evidence that the young girl was seduced: a coat borrowed from the Dutchess, alcohol bottles, and smoked cigars. Holmes deduces that one cigar was put out by a lady's shoe and the other was left to burn out by a man.

Another victim is found shortly after Holmes finishes interrogating everyone in the Dutchess's mansion. Lady Georgina, daughter of Sir Ma.s.singham, is s.n.a.t.c.hed from her bed in the middle of the night. In another showy demonstration of Holmes's aesthetic sight, he asks for a moment alone in the room. The return of the musical score from the first crime scene indicates Holmes's aesthetic sight is engaged. He hones in on the crumbs of clues left behind by the criminal: plaster from a ceiling tile, removed to enter Georgina's room unseen, the smell of chloroform sticks to the air, the same chemical used to sedate Lady Alice.

The climactic scene in which Holmes has tracked the serial killer to his lair is highly explicit and unsteadily straddles the line between suggesting that either Holmes's s.e.xuality or his drug addiction help him identify with this criminal. Holmes tries luring the killer away from Roberta, the kidnapped fourth victim who is still alive. He admits his own cocaine addiction and relates it to the killer's fetish for feet and shoes. The atmosphere becomes very eerie when Holmes identifies himself with the criminal, yet this quality makes him a brilliant detective, like Dupin, who could see into the hearts of men.

The creators of Sherlock-starring Benedict c.u.mberbatch and Martin Freeman-imagine Holmes's aesthetic sight much like the Everett version. Upon Holmes's arrival at a crime scene, the point-of-view switches to first person. Our perspective joins with his, and we experience a taste of his heightened perception. His field of vision becomes narrower, more acute. We see some logic come into play visually in Sherlock, represented by numbers, algorithms, and words crisscrossing the screen, but Holmes's instinct to connect the dots to the killer make him invaluable to Scotland Yard.

After the fifth suspected suicide in "A Study in Pink," the first episode, Inspector Lestrade finally invites Holmes to lend his expertise. Holmes bl.u.s.ters through the police officers monitoring the perimeter of an abandon building with Watson hobbling in tow. Refusing to wear any protective gear except for a pair of latex gloves, he enters the top-floor bedroom of the skeletal house and gets to work. Lestrade and Watson stand aside silently while the camera closes in on Holmes's inquisitive face and the score signals he has entered the same trance-like state Everett displayed in Silk Stocking. Extreme close-ups force our perspective into Holmes's point of view as he deciphers a word the victim scratched on the floor, "Rache . . ." We close in on Holmes's hands feeling the wetness under her coat collar, examining her dry umbrella, polished earrings, necklace, and unpolished wedding ring. For each item, text descriptions and a.n.a.lyses blink onto the screen as if accessing a computer database in Holmes's mind.

When he comes out of the trance, Holmes concludes that the woman was unhappily married ten years, packed a small suitcase which is missing from the scene, and removed her wedding ring many times during affairs revealed by the polish on the inside but not the outside. All Watson can say is "Fantastic!" and "That's incredible!" We get the idea that Holmes is interested in keeping Watson, his new roommate, primarily as an admirer and not yet a protege.

Watson does make some keen superficial observations of Holmes's investigative behavior in A Study in Scarlet that visually match with how Holmes's methods are so faithfully portrayed in the two BBC adaptations mentioned here: "As he spoke, his nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere, feeling, pressing, unb.u.t.toning, examining, while his eyes wore the same far-away expression which I have already remarked upon. So swiftly was the examination made, that one would hardly have guessed the minuteness with which it was conducted."

Holmes makes another flashy demonstration of his aesthetic sight in the second Sherlock episode, "The Blind Banker." Watson tags along with Holmes to the Shad Sanderson investment bank where an anonymous, as of yet, indecipherable message was left in yellow spray paint across an antique framed portrait of the bank's former chairman. Holmes takes a few minutes to stand in every vantage point in the office, searching for the first person to have seen the painted message. He finally settles on the office of Edward Van c.o.o.n whom Holmes tracks down at his condo where the man is found shot. A young Detective Inspector Dimmock who now works with Lestrade shows up at the scene and immediately judges that it's a suicide. Holmes scoffs at his weak opinion and explains, "It's one possible explanation of some of the facts. You've got a solution that you like, but you're choosing to ignore anything you see that doesn't comply with it. The wound's on the right side of his [c.o.o.n's] skull. Van c.o.o.n was left handed." As usual, Holmes's observations are at first written off as insincere and absurd, but they inevitably lead to a Chinese murderess seeking a precious nine-million-pound hairpin Van c.o.o.n bought for his secretary.

While Holmes does offer an explanation linking facts, he fails to reveal how he concludes a case before gathering evidence. His penetrating aesthetic sight is enhanced by the details of a case, but the facts, testimonies, and clues do not produce answers on their own. Holmes applies his keen aesthetic sense to the case and draws out the true nature or motive behind a crime. He is both aware and clueless of his own ability.

He claims in "The Final Problem," "Of late I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by nature rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible." This is all preposterous because Holmes is driven by the rare brilliance of his enemies and compet.i.tors, Dr. Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade, Mycroft, and the many criminals Holmes takes pleasure in a.n.a.lyzing.

The detective is not in the business of jailing or prosecuting criminals as in The Hound of Baskervilles or "The Speckled Band." Holmes's true payoff is a poetic one.

Chapter 19.

A Touch of the Dramatic.

Tamas Demeter.

Is Sherlock Holmes a cold-blooded scientist, a human computer, a dessicated calculating machine? Or is he an artist, a visionary, a dreamer of strange romances?

Holmes keeps telling Watson, and telling us, that he's a scientist. And Holmes believes that being a scientist involves looking at the facts without prejudice, and then making deductions from those observed facts.

You would think from all this that if you accurately observe the facts, and are good at logical reasoning, you would be able to solve crimes like Holmes. But we know that there's more to it than that.

Holmes often insists that his own peculiar talents are cold, austere, logical, scientific, and unemotional. He prizes "that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature" of any case. According to Holmes, "whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things." He declares that "The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning." Watson think s of him as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen" Holmes often seems to imply that the solution of a case follows logically from the evidence. "I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive to the logical faculty." And yet, we know that Holmes often entertains one theory of a case, only to discard it later, in favor of a better theory.

Holmes's own description of what he does when solving cases is a somewhat misleading account of what he actually does. His description leaves out the crucial role of intuition, imagination, inspired guesswork, or artistic flair.

Between gathering the facts and solving the crime, Sherlock Holmes is a creator of stories: his stories are explanations of what might have happened, imaginative constructions of possible scenarios. Once the stories have been composed, they can then be compared with the observed facts of the case. These facts support or contradict the stories in different ways. It is here that Holmes uses his reasoning powers to pick the true story from among several alternative stories.

Creating Stories.

However cold-blooded and methodical Holmes's technique of selecting a true explanation may seem, he first has to invent these stories-which we may also call scientific hypotheses. This crucial phase of inventing hypotheses is not a matter of observation and deduction. It requires something like artistic imagination.

Holmes's hypotheses are in fact different narratives each establis.h.i.+ng possible connections among the various facts he has collected. These connections bestow significance upon the facts, and thereby they turn them into evidence: the way in which facts are interconnected within a particular narrative structure reveals their possible implications and relevance in various, and sometimes conflicting, ways.

Having arrived at possible hypotheses with different distribution of significance among various facts, selecting the true narrative can be deductive. Yet organizing facts into narrative patterns requires a set of values and sensitivities that go far beyond observation and deduction. In fact, Holmes's method requires an immense strength of narrative imagination, a quality he finds conspicuously missing in inspectors Lestrade and Gregory.

There are several pa.s.sages in various stories in which Sherlock Holmes himself or other figures like Dr. Watson or Lestrade comment on the methods Holmes follows in his investigations. In these pa.s.sages this method is described as purely deductive. However, as Peter Lipton has pointed out, it is not deductive in the strictly logical sense. According to logic, deduction means that the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. But typically in Holmes's 'deductions', Holmes's solution to the case is not logically guaranteed to be correct if the premises (the items are evidence) are correct.

Furthermore, collecting facts is at least as crucial a pillar of Holmes's method as drawing conclusions from them. Facts are collected by minute observations and an a.n.a.lysis of experience. Collecting peculiar and unusual facts is the key to solving the cases, because singular events can be explored through their singular features that distinguish them from more routine events. As Holmes points out, "The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn" (A Study in Scarlet).

Holmes emphasizes in "The Science of Deduction" (The Sign of the Four) that deduction and observation are two distinct phases of investigation. Working out the possible implications of facts collected leads to a pool of possible explanatory hypotheses.

The phase of creating hypotheses is not strictly deductive; given the total evidence Holmes collects in support of his hypotheses, the hypotheses may easily prove to be false-and sometimes indeed they do turn out to be false. But the process of selecting the true hypothesis from the pool of possible hypotheses can be made out to be deductive. As Holmes puts it: "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" (The Sign of the Four; this statement appears again nearly verbatim in "The Blanched Soldier").

Holmes frequently applies this eliminative strategy not only in the final reconstruction of a case, but sometimes also while taking steps in the course of investigation, while deciding which hypothesis to accept for the moment as working hypothesis. If seen from this angle, Holmes is almost naturally represented as a "scientific detective"; even if his body of knowledge, consisting almost exclusively of information or collected evidence relevant for criminal investigation, is "without a scientific system" ("The Lion's Mane").

Closer to Art than Science?

This intermediate phase of Holmes's method, namely the one that lies in between collecting facts and selecting the true hypothesis, is the construction of the pool of hypotheses from which selection can proceed deductively. This consists in working out the implications and establis.h.i.+ng connections among various pieces of possible evidence-the phase of finding out how things might have been.

You might think that this part of Holmes's method is closer to art than science: it requires more of an artistic imagination than the ability to make accurate deductions. It's a form of narrative explanation, and understanding this feature in Holmes's method allows the image of a "scientific detective" to be unmasked as the ideology of Holmesian inquiry which serves the purposes of advancing Holmes's profession.

In fact this creative use of the imagination is always vital to science. The description of science as purely logical is a huge blunder, a blunder that people were sometimes p.r.o.ne to make in the Victorian era. All the greatest scientific advances-those of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, or Pasteur-involve vast leaps of the imagination. No logical method has ever been found for generating good hypotheses. This aspect of science was most famously captured by Albert Einstein, when he said: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Are Bizarre Explanations Better?

As Watson notes explicitly, Holmes had "a preference for a subtle and bizarre explanation when a plainer and more commonplace one lay ready to his hand." This is not always a virtue when searching for the truth, and thus it's hardly surprising that even Watson notes that some of Holmes's inferences are erroneous precisely because of this preference. Normally, simplicity is one of the main reasons for giving preference to one hypothesis over another, and if Holmes were in the business of inferring to the best explanation, this would be a value to keep an eye on. Search for the most simple explanation! should be one of his main heuristic rules. But in fact, for Holmes, it isn't.

Holmes has rules for discovering facts, and these rules help us to distinguish Holmes's method from that of professional detectives in Doyle's stories. An important methodological rule can be distilled from Holmes's warning that "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact" ("The Bos...o...b.. Valley Mystery").

As we know from Watson's chronicles, Holmes's colleagues are inclined to rely on items of evidence according to their manifest weight, and therefore they are also inclined to ignore, or not even notice, facts which look insignificant. Holmes consciously avoids such prejudice concerning possible pieces of evidence. The unconscious preference for the obvious naturally leads Holmes's colleagues to overlook relevant or potentially relevant facts, and this inclination often leads to going astray in the course of investigation. Even Holmes sometimes makes this mistake, as early in "Silver Blaze" for example.

This rule can be generalized from the phase of fact-collecting to the entire process of investigation: "I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me" ("The Reigate Puzzle"). While it seems that his professional colleagues are more inclined to cling to the first theory they have thought of, Holmes takes pain to collect facts as impartially and as completely as possible, and to speculate only after that. The inclination to build theories on conclusions hastily drawn diverts the proper course of investigation by making facts subservient to theories. As one of Holmes's central methodological rules has it: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts" ("A Scandal in Bohemia").

Fact collecting may be distorted by trying to make the facts fit a prior theory, yet we can't avoid setting up hypotheses at some stage of the investigation. Our hypotheses may then lead us astray, as in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," but this danger is less threatening if hypotheses do not grow into prejudices and always remain liable to revision in the light of some new fact or by the recombination of already acquired ones.

Connecting the Dots.