Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Conan Doyle

Perfection, in Conan Doyle's hands, is less a compliment to logic than a dare to the reader's appetite for mastery. The "ideal reasoner" isn't merely smart; he's omnivorous. Give him one fact "in all its bearings" and he reverse-engineers the entire past, then fast-forwards into the future, turning reality into a solvable diagram. It's an intoxicating fantasy: the world as legible, the messy human stuff reduced to a chain.

The intent is partly programmatic. Doyle is sketching the operating system of Sherlock Holmes, a character built to make modern life feel manageable at the very moment it was getting noisier, faster, and harder to interpret. Late-Victorian London is a data storm: crowded streets, new bureaucracies, emerging forensic science, headlines, rumors. Against that chaos, "a single fact" becomes a life raft - proof that the right mind can impose order without needing moral certainty or political power.

The subtext is the seduction and the danger of deduction-as-totalizing. "All its bearings" quietly does a lot of work: who gets to decide which bearings matter? The quote flatters the detective's gaze as neutral, but it also reveals how authoritarian certainty can masquerade as pure reasoning. Holmes-like inference promises inevitability - past and future locked in place once the fact is properly seen. Doyle's trick is that the line sells the romance of rationality while smuggling in its hubris: the dream that a human being can see the whole board, not just the next move.