"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt"
About this Quote
Doyle’s line has the clipped decisiveness of a detective closing a case: pick a conclusion, even an ugly one, because the real enemy is the fog. “Any truth” isn’t a noble hymn to objectivity so much as a pragmatist’s ultimatum. Truth here functions like a tourniquet. It may hurt, it may leave a scar, but it stops the bleed of “indefinite doubt” - that uniquely modern condition where uncertainty metastasizes into paralysis.
The phrasing does sly work. “Any” is deliberately indiscriminate, almost reckless; it flirts with the idea that certainty itself is a form of relief worth paying for. Doyle, writing in an era hooked on rational inquiry, empire-scale information, and the new prestige of science, understood that people don’t only want facts. They want the psychic comfort of a story that settles. That’s Sherlock Holmes’s real product: not just detection, but termination. The case ends. The room stops spinning.
The subtext is more anxious than it looks. Doubt is framed as “indefinite” - not the productive skepticism of a good mind, but the endless, unbounded kind that erodes agency. In that sense, the quote reads like a warning about the costs of suspension: moral, emotional, civic. If you can’t name what’s happening, you can’t act on it.
Still, Doyle’s absolutism carries a quiet risk: when certainty becomes the goal, “truth” can start to mean “whatever lets me stop thinking.” That tension - between clarity as liberation and clarity as temptation - is exactly why the line lands. It’s less a philosophy than a pressure point.
The phrasing does sly work. “Any” is deliberately indiscriminate, almost reckless; it flirts with the idea that certainty itself is a form of relief worth paying for. Doyle, writing in an era hooked on rational inquiry, empire-scale information, and the new prestige of science, understood that people don’t only want facts. They want the psychic comfort of a story that settles. That’s Sherlock Holmes’s real product: not just detection, but termination. The case ends. The room stops spinning.
The subtext is more anxious than it looks. Doubt is framed as “indefinite” - not the productive skepticism of a good mind, but the endless, unbounded kind that erodes agency. In that sense, the quote reads like a warning about the costs of suspension: moral, emotional, civic. If you can’t name what’s happening, you can’t act on it.
Still, Doyle’s absolutism carries a quiet risk: when certainty becomes the goal, “truth” can start to mean “whatever lets me stop thinking.” That tension - between clarity as liberation and clarity as temptation - is exactly why the line lands. It’s less a philosophy than a pressure point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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