Clue

“ I’m just a plain sailor—I don’t pretend to be good at following up clues. But if the police want this here clue, they can have it. It’s the best one of its kind I ever come across: look at it from whatever side you please. It’s almost as perfect a clue as you could have, if you had one made to order. A policeman that couldn’t follow up that clue——‘Tresco’ on the knife, and, alongside of it, the bit of mail-bag—why, he ought to be turned loose in an unsympathising world, and break stones for a living. It’s a beautiful clue. It’s a clue a man can take a pride in; found all ready on the beach ”

“ The right clue is not necessarily hit upon at the first try; usually the reasoner finds one clue after another, and follows each one up by recall, only to get nowhere, till finally he notices a sign that recalls a pertinent meaning. His exploration of the situation, though carried on by aid of recalled experience instead of by locomotion, still resembles finding the way out of a maze with many blind alleys. In short, reasoning may be called a trial and error process in the sphere of mental reactions. ”

“ Your immediate job is certainly to follow up the clues you have found. Even if they do not lead where we expect them to lead, they will probably lead somewhere. A deliberately laid false clue is often just as useful as an ordinary straightforward clue in the long run. ”

“ Who, fond of literature, shall not sympathize with such an inquirer—his hopes, discoveries, disappointments? How often is he befriended by chance! A date, a name, a fact, an allusion, a reference, however slight, even to an unpromising object, suddenly starts from some obscure corner to gladden his eye and heart, and give assurance that he who works diligently shall not work in vain. Even when positive facts fail, there may be ground for plausible conjecture. A slender clue may track a labyrinth. ”

“ The search of memory for a clue shows itself in a peculiar manner in the case of a dream which we have forgotten on awaking, for in this case we seek in vain for that which a few minutes before occupied our minds with the strength of the clearest present, but now has entirely disappeared. ”

“ A clue is afforded us in this direction by the fact of the multiplicity of observers; a course is a course, i.e., a something, some condition of the “external world,” which has no reference to who observes it, and must be the same for all. ”

“ Of late years there has been a growing tendency among scholars to seek in the Mysteries the clue which shall enable us to read aright the baffling riddle of the Grail, and there can be little doubt that, in so doing, we are on the right path. ”

“ A clue is furnished which, followed up with ordinary diligence, may enable any one, with a taste for the pursuit, to trace a distinguished Shakespearean worthy to his lineal representative in the present day. ”

“ Eyes and ears which can see and hear, memory to record at once and to recall at pleasure the impressions of the senses, and an imagination capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken chain, or unravelling a tangled clue, such are implements of his trade to a successful diagnostician. ”

“ First a fad, then a best seller, the Cross Word Puzzle Book became an American institution, immortalized in cartoons by Briggs, prose-epics by Bob Benchley, and ballads by F. P. A. [2]
Ordinary books are meant to be read. Here is a book in which one writes—more than that, a book in which one has the supreme satisfaction of unravelling a real mystery, tracking down clue after clue. ”

“ And when a clue, no matter how faint, has once been struck, it must be followed up patiently, intelligibly, and doggedly. There are three golden rules to be strictly observed by him who would succeed in connecting crime with its author. They are patience, silence, watchfulness.
‘Human craft and human cunning are very difficult things to deal with, nor can one deal with them at all unless he is deeply read in human nature. In this instance craft of no ordinary kind had to be encountered. The criminal, to begin with, was not of the ordinary type. ”

“ Doubtless, more frequently than the complete dropping of the link out of consciousness is the doubt, the query, whether one really has wound the clock, or locked the door, or put out the lights, or posted the letters, or taken one's medicine, or even eaten one's lunch; and one proceeds to verify by actual examination or by some definite memory-clue that it has been done. ”

“ Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home. ”

“ He expects the next man who meets him in the street will accuse him to his face. And not unfrequent is it, that by the very alarm and uneasiness, the strange anxiety and restlessness which he betrays, the eye of suspicion is turned upon him, and a clue is furnished, which leads to the disclosure of his crime. ”

“ and besides this, there is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty. ”

“ I shall be pleased if any one who shares my distrust of the authorities, and who has any clue whatever to this terrible mystery or any plausible suggestion to offer, if, in brief, any 'One who looks through his own spectacles' will communicate with me. If I were asked to indicate the direction in which new clues might be most usefully sought, I should say, in the first instance, anything is valuable that helps us to piece together a complete picture of the manifold activities of the man in the East-end. ”

“ It is now high time that we show the reader how to find the clue to a cypher. And as illustration is always better than precept, we shall exemplify from our own experience. With permission, too, we shall drop the plural for the singular. ”

“ I may state, for what it is worth, that as a matter of fact normal clues to identity are disliked, and, in so far as they are gratuitous, are even resented, by a good medium; for they are no manner of use, and yet subsequently they appear to spoil evidence. ”

“ And if I do anything in a case I always make it a rule to see and hear everything that can possibly be seen or heard, important or not. Clues lie where least expected. But beyond that, probably I may never have another chance of a little experience in a diving-dress. ”

“ Finding the minor premise is a matter of observation, and if you fail to observe the significant fact about the problem, the really useful major premise may lie dormant, known and retained but not recalled, while false clues suggest inapplicable major premises and give birth to plenty of reasoning but all to no purpose. Some persons with abundant knowledge are ineffective reasoners from lack of a sense for probability. The efficient reasoner must be a good guesser. ”

“ Indeed, those most successful are those who, while paying attention to all outward and so-called tangible clues, do not neglect for one moment the impressions received, and the thoughts felt, when gathering information likely to lead to the detection of the law-breakers. ”

“ You looked again and again, and the longer that you looked the more certain became your belief that you were on the verge of discovery. If you could approach the mysterious legend from a slightly different point of view, or look at it from another distance, the clew to the puzzle would be seized, and the words would stand forth clear and legible in your sight. But the clew never had been discovered, and the motto, if there was one, remained unread. ”

“ This is, indeed, involved in what has been said about the nature of the process. Insight, as we have seen, though here classed [Pg 229] with preservative cognition, occupies a kind of border-land between immediate knowledge or intuition and inference, shading off from the one to the other. And in the very nature of the case the scope for error must be great. Even overlooking human reticence, and, what is worse, human hypocrisy, the conditions of an accurate reading of others' minds are rarely realized. ”

“ I meditate and inquire into the mystery of the universe unceasingly; 155 but in the background of my inquiry, from time to time a solution appears, a discovery which urges my exploring mind onward. Mystery itself is not mystery unless it be known as such, and then it becomes knowledge. Inquiry is therefore at once a research and a discovery. ”

“ This investigation, almost at one stroke, throws a blinding light upon the entire field of the phenomena; accounting in large part for the vast aggregate of testimony in favor of miracles by actual witnesses, demonstrating the readiness with which we may unwittingly deceive ourselves by false observation and others by lapses of [156] memory, as to what we actually witnessed; and again presenting the nature of these fallible characteristics of sense-perception and memory, of inference and judgment, so strikingly and tangibly as to serve as a classic illustration for the psychologist. ”

“ I ask you: where has the mystery been hiding all these years?"
"That is a question I shall not try to answer, Mr. Rhodes. It is my belief. however, that the mystery has never been hiding,—using the word, that is, in its literal signification." ”

“ Who has not, at some time or other of his life, experienced the force of that casuistry which is begotten of suspicion? Who has not felt how completely reason is mastered by the subtle assaults of a wily ingenuity which, whilst combining the false and the true, the possible and impossible together, makes out a mock array of evidence almost too strong for a doubt? ”

“ One circumstance, which has created much doubt and suspicion, must not be concealed; which is, that if any substance, for instance, a book or a shawl, be interposed between her eyes and the object she is investigating, she is much embarrassed, and frequently entirely baffled. ”

“ So in discussing the illusions of memory we estimated objective time by the judgment of the average man, free from individual bias, and apart from special circumstances favourable to error. Similarly, in the case of belief, true belief was held to be that which men in general, or in the long run, or on the average, hold true, as distinguished from what the individual under variable and accidental influences holds true. And even in the case of introspection we found that true cognition resolved itself into a consensus or agreement as to certain psychical facts. ”

“ There had seldom been a case in which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic—an apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the unvital and immaterial—as a preliminary to a swift volte-face by which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory which captivated and—for the moment—convinced. ”

“ But because it deals with the unseen, not with the seen, it is a thousand times more uncertain and baffling. We have ears, eyes, touch—a great equipment—to perceive gold, silver, stones, trees, water. But we have only this mind, a mystery even to ourselves, to perceive an idea, a concept. ”

“ And if, reflecting on this all-pervasive character of the Intelligible and of Intelligence, we formulate certain 'Laws of Thought', we are condensing into isolated judgements truth for which there is overwhelming evidence. Such judgements are 'indubitable'; for an intelligent doubt presupposes knowledge, and any and every knowledge inevitably, confirms them. ”

“ The chain of evidence on which hangs, as I have so often said, the sole hypothesis by which I can account for the mysterious occurrences that form the subject of our inquiry, is not only of a purely circumstantial character, but also of a nature at once so delicate and so complicated that the failure of a single link would render the remainder altogether worthless. ”

“ Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those which prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part. ”

“ It is important to emphasize the serious limitations as yet attaching to our knowledge of the detailed possibilities of normal perception and inference, in order to realize the corresponding hesitancy with which we should regard any series of facts, no matter how apparently inexplicable, as evidence of a supernormal kind of mental telegraphy. ”

“ And nature will not be surprised into disclosures. The man stretched out there may have been voluble as a swallow, but now—when he could speak to some purpose—neither pyramid nor sphinx holds a secret more tenaciously. ”

“ It might at first seem as if perception, introspection, and memory must exhaust all that is meant by immediate, or self-evident, knowledge, and as if what I have here called belief must be uniformly mediate, derivate, or inferred knowledge. The apprehension of something now present to the mind, externally or internally, and the reapprehension through the process of memory of what was once so apprehended, might appear to be the whole of what can by any stretch of language be called direct cognition of things. ”

“ And as the false and imperfect keys, which turn up to the decypherer in his researches, prepare the way for the discovery of the true and complete one, so any hypothesis that has so much plausibility as to explain a considerable number of facts, helps us to digest these facts in proper order, to bring new ones to light, and to make experimenta crucis for the sake of future inquirers. ”

“ He shows no interest in the processes of enquiry,—in tracing the operation of great laws in manifold phenomena,—in investigating one obscure subject after another, with the confident assurance that every discovery [pg 204] is a step towards the light and the ultimate revelation of the whole mystery. ”

“ The present volume takes a wide survey of the field of error, embracing in its view not only the illusions of sense dealt with in treatises on physiological optics, etc., but also other errors familiarly known as illusions, and resembling the former in their structure and mode of origin. I have throughout endeavoured to keep to a strictly scientific treatment, that is to say, the description and classification of acknowledged errors, and the explanation of these by a reference to their psychical and physical conditions. ”