A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Author:Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Limited
Published: 2013-08-26T22:00:00+00:00

14. The Conclusion

We had all been warned to appear before the magistrates upon the Thursday; but when the Thursday came there was no occasion for our testimony. A higher judge had taken the matter in hand, and Jefferson Hope had been summoned before a tribunal where strict justice would be meted out to him. On the very night after his capture the aneurism burst, and he was found in the morning stretched upon the floor of the cell, with a placid smile upon his face, as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done.

‘Gregson and Lestrade will be wild about his death,’ Holmes remarked, as we chatted it over next evening. ‘Where will their grand advertisement be now?’

‘I don’t see that they had very much to do with his capture,’ I answered.

‘What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,’ returned my companion, bitterly. ‘The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done. Never mind,’ he continued, more brightly, after a pause. ‘I would not have missed the investigation for anything. There has been no better case within my recollection. Simple as it was, there were several most instructive points about it.’

‘Simple!’ I ejaculated.

‘Well, really, it can hardly be described as otherwise,’ said Sherlock Holmes, smiling at my surprise. ‘The proof of its intrinsic simplicity is that without any help save a few very ordinary deductions I was able to lay my hand upon the criminal within three days.’

‘That is true,’ said I.

‘I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.’

‘I confess,’ said I, ‘that I do not quite follow you.’

‘I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.’

‘I understand,’ said I.

‘Now this was a case in which you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself. Now let me endeavour to show you the different steps in my reasoning.

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