Sherlock Holmes as a Clairvoyant

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
Revision as of 11:24, 26 May 2018 by TCDE-Team (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Sherlock Holmes as a Clairvoyant is an article published in the Daily Mail on 10 november 1928, including a part of an interview with Arthur Conan Doyle.


Sherlock Holmes as a Clairvoyant

Daily Mail (11 november 1928, p. 5)

Sir Conan Doyle Visualises a Crimeless World.

Police Station Spiritualists.

Sir A. Conan Doyle, creator of the greatest detective in fiction ever known, has visualised the coming of the clairvoyant Sherlock Holmes and a practically crimeless world.

"We shall have a clairvoyant in attendance at every police station, and every offence will be hunted down so that crime will become very difficult. if not impossible," he states. "Clairvoyants will often be able to tell who actually committed a crime. If you give them a portion of the dress of a murdered person they are frequently able to throw themselves back to the time of a murder and get a kind of intimation of the circumstances of the murder and how it was done.

"Even now the police use clairvoyants surreptitiously in many places — in the intervals of persecuting them.

REVOLUTIONARY.

"Spiritualism is going to revolutionise the world in every possible way. It will revolutionise religion by getting back to actual contact, which I have no doubt once existed, but has been completely lost. Then it will revolutionise science and medicine and criminology in many ways. The whole question of lunacy and mania and obsession comes up.

"We have at least two doctors in the United States engaged in casting out devils. Ordinary doctors could do nothing with an invasion by an outside spirit, but these men persuade it to leave. One or two are just attempting it in Great Britain.

"PREPOSTEROUS" LAWS.

"The laws by which mediums are prosecuted existed long before spiritualism, and were applied to lawless characters. To apply them to respectable women and householders is preposterous.

"I think I should be putting it high if I said that 5 per cent. of mediums were frauds."