"It's devilish, Mr. Holmes; devilish!" cried Mortimer Tregennis. "It is not of this world. Something has come into that room which has dashed the light of reason from their minds. What human contrivance could do that?"
"I fear," said Holmes, "that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back on such a theory as this."
- Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
As written by the celebrated author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and his friend and colleague Doctor Watson were men of science. Holmes was exquisitely educated on a vast array of subjects, from Neolithic artifacts to chemistry all the way down to the make and composition of cigar ash and bicycle tires. He possessed a great library of rare and informative books, a variety of clever disguises, and a keen imagination. Using these tools, he fueled a deductive mental power that made the public cheer and Scotland Yard scratch their heads in bewilderment. No puzzle was unsolvable by the great Sherlock Holmes, and having read every one of his stories and having grown up watching the excellent series by Grenada Television, Holmes was always one of my own favorite fictional characters. He made me glad to be smart in a world that nurtures ignorance and disdains critical thinking.
From time to time in his mysteries, Holmes was encountered with strange and frightening phenomena that others in their hysteria and ignorance were quick to credit to the supernatural. But Holmes, always the cold, analytical realist, pursued the cases with real world expectations and indeed always concluded them with perfectly earthly explanations. Even the dreaded Hound of the Baskervilles, a demonic, spectral dog that stalked the moors at night, turned out to be nothing so fanciful in the end.
When it came to ego, Holmes had this to say:
"I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers."
Excellently put, and one of my most favorite quotes…but this truth only applies if someone’s deductions are clear, i.e. if they are accurately gauging their own abilities. As we shall see, if we lack such discretion our egos can run away with us, and it is generally agreed that this is at least a contributing factor in what happened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Needless to say, after his Holmes stories in particular, Doyle enjoyed tremendous success. He had truly achieved worldwide acclaim and was even knighted by the Queen. But the time was the 1920s, and the spiritualist movement was in full swing. Seances, auras, ghostly photography, ectoplasm and other such hoo-ha were all the rage, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle evidently promptly forgot about such things as gullibility, half-truths, exaggerations, false expertise, selective reporting, and good ol’ needing to believe…at least as they applied to himself. In other words, he dove into the bullshit pit head first and never came up for air again.
Indeed, Conan Doyle became one of spiritualism’s leading torchbearers, even as his friend Harry Houdini was making the rounds debunking the same nonsense. We are thus faced with a very confusing dichotomy between the writing and the man. To be sure, Sherlock Holmes was not his only rational work. He also wrote such novels as The Lost World which, while based on a fundamentally flawed concept, proceeded in the footsteps of reality and scientific inquiry.
So what the hell happened to him? I do not know for certain. I have never fully understood this grotesque transformation. The compartmentalization of the human mind is lamentably common, but a seemingly complete reversal of the rational mind of this magnitude is extremely rare and is utterly inscrutable to me. In Conan Doyle’s case it is sometimes speculated that the traumatic death of his son in World War I drove him to emotional desperation that destroyed his reason, but it is more generally agreed that he simply fell victim to his own fame. People figured that if Holmes was so brilliant, the man who created him must have been at least as much so. How could the “father” of the great Sherlock Homes, one of the most powerful minds in literature, possibly be wrong? Thus, Conan Doyle wrote his articles and spouted his nonsense fundamentally unopposed.
Perhaps his best known blunder involved a series of photographs that are now referred to as the “Cottingley Fairies.” On a lark, two little girls in Cottingley took a few trick photographs using paper cutouts and some simple developing techniques to create what superficially appear to be photographs of the girls interacting with fairies and gnomes. Frances and Elsie and their family placed no importance on the photographs until a friend of Conan Doyle’s wrote him a letter suggesting that the pictures were in fact real.
Conan Doyle immediately attacked the photographs with what I can comfortably call idiotic glee. He was reinforced in his error by a man named Edward Gardner, who was a believer in theosophy (a very long word that just means “retarded crap”). In turn, Gardner fed off of Conan Doyle’s fame, and together the two began building their massive castle of stupid.
Here are two of the pictures:
In the age of Photoshop and other illusory art forms in particular, these are perhaps too obviously phony to us, let alone to any expert in photography, even during the period in question, but the errors committed by Conan Doyle and Gardner in their “investigation” of the photographs are legion, far more than I have room for here, and they led the great author inexorably to the conclusion that these pictures were “utterly beyond any possibility of faking!” To cite one consistent example, Conan Doyle gobbled up special pleadings left and right. When it was observed in the first photograph that Elsie is not even looking at the fairy but a tad sideways, he became convinced that this is because looking directly at fey folk disconcerts them and will cause them to vanish. Thus, Elsie had learned to look askew at them! Excuses for why the second photo in particular must be depicting a moving fairy that is strangely clear and not blurry – something that would be common even in more modern cameras – are even more blatant and ludicrous. There was no attempt at proving any of it, only the barest and most shameless rationalizing that Conan Doyle could pull from his ass, and the list goes on.
And on and on...so long that it eventually resulted in a published volume. Conan Doyle released The Coming of the Fairies in 1922. Spiritualists crowed and non-retarded people facepalmed...but never in front of the man himself. I believe that if Sherlock Holmes had seen his creator chasing fairies he would have hung his head in shame. For where were Conan Doyle's own powers of reason and deduction? Where was his education? Can we really pin all the blame on ego? If so, how might things have been different had someone simply tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Hey Art, all this fairy crap of yours...well, it's making you look pretty freaking dumb. Maybe you’d better give it a rest.”
Of course, Conan Doyle is not the only person who is guilty of this sort of queer rational inconsistency, nor even the only author - An excellent modern example is Michael Crichton. Though his novels overflow with scientific modus, the man himself needed a good kick in the brain. From Wikipedia:
At Harvard he (Crichton) developed the belief that all diseases, including heart attacks, are direct effects of a patient's state of mind. He later wrote: "We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us." Eventually he came to believe in auras, spoon bending, and clairvoyance.
If these are the sorts of things one learns at Harvard, then I'm inclined to think the school does not deserve its stellar reputation. I wonder what state of mind of his own Crichton took to be the cause of the throat cancer that rotted out his neck and eventually killed him.
He was also an outspoken critic of global warming, though I wonder how much he knew about warmth at all judging by his roughly 47 failed marriages. Ah, but I ad hom. Well, good riddance to him in any case.
I suppose what's important about these men is that their writings are what will live on, and if the authors themselves turned out to be fruit loops, at least their stories are purveyors of rationality and science.
But there are still people who believe that the Cottingley Fairies are entirely real thanks to the inventor of Sherlock Holmes.
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