What effect did the sight of the hound have on Holmes and
the speake
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Answer:
Perhaps no character in the history of literature is so endowed with pure reason as is Sherlock Holmes. His fictional prowess is such that both his first and last name have been turned into adjectives (Sherlockian, Holmesian) used to describe people of unusual perceptiveness and reasoning. While Holmes is a character with a real-life inspiration—Arthur Conan Doyle’s college professor Joseph Bell—he is also a product of the optimism of Doyle’s time, which had an increasing sense that the rationality of science would one day be able to explain all of life’s mysteries. In Holmes, Doyle creates a character who embodies this belief, with Holmes’ success at detective work suggesting that reason has the ability to cut through not only natural mysteries, like alleged hauntings, but also the criminal mysteries that man creates through his subterfuge and cunning—if one can only overcome the emotions that tend to cloud that reason.
From his introduction, Holmes shows how much information is available to a thinking, logical man if he only chooses to look for it. For instance, when Watson and Holmes discover they’ve missed a caller at Baker Street, Holmes is able to deduce the name of the caller (Dr. Mortimer), his age, his occupation, where he lives, and even what pets he owns from the walking stick that Mortimer left behind. Holmes accomplishes this through careful consideration of all of the elements of the walking stick—its dedicatory plaque, how worn it is, where it’s been chewed on—coupled with a consideration of what might reasonably be deduced from those elements. When Watson attempts this, his deductions prove all wrong, because he has failed to take into consideration all of the facts. Instead, Watson crafts a fanciful, even emotional, story featuring what he imagines about the owner. Watson’s attempts only use some of the facts, and he makes emotional deductions that aren’t supported by evidence—such as when he imagines Mortimer to be a bumbling old country doctor. This reliance on emotion, rather than reason, leads Watson astray.
A similar conflict between reason and rationality occurs when Holmes and Watson are forced to confront the possibility of a supernatural explanation for the death of Sir Charles Baskerville. The (quite understandable) emotions that the inhabitants of Baskerville Hall and Dr. Watson feel about a hellhound stalking them blind them to the empirical realities of that hound. That is, the dog leaves very real footprints, and its demonstrably real howl—that of a regular, and not otherworldly, dog—is heard throughout the moor. An eminently rational man, Holmes knows that such physical traces must come from a physical animal. Indeed, when the animal finally makes its attempt on Sir Henry Baskerville, Holmes is the first to shoot it, because he knows that—rationally—an animal that has the physical body needed to leave footprints in the moor also has a physical body that can be brought down by bullets. The others simply stand in terror. Similarly, Holmes is the first to recognize that the beast does not really have glowing eyes, and does not breathe fire, but rather has been painted with phosphorous. He is able to do this because his extreme rationality has overridden the natural emotion of fear affecting the reasoning skills of Watson and Mortimer. This, in turn, enables Holmes to unravel the hound’s mystery.
Even Holmes’ decision to “stake out” Baskerville Hall from the nomadic hut on the moor—a choice that ultimately allows the case to be solved—is one enabled by a triumph of reason over emotion. When Watson imagines Neolithic man living in these huts, he shudders and pities anyone that would have to live under such conditions. The same is true when Watson ponders the case of Selden, the escaped convict living on the moor. He feels a kind of empathy for the man on the run, even going so far as to suggest that the hardships Selden undergoes on the moor should count as partial repayment for his crimes.
Chapter 1 Quotes
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast-table. I stood upon the hearthrug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before.
Really, Watson