I am on a trip, so let me put down some quick trivia for you.
How did Dr. Watson meet Sherlock Holmes? In what city, town or village?
How was Dr. Watson wounded? In what war?
What knowledge did Sherlock Holmes tell Dr. Watson that he would try to forget. Why?
How much did Dr. Watson make a month when he first met Sherlock Holmes?
What instrument did Sherlock Holmes play most expertly?
I’ll play…
They met in London, when Holmes was looking for a roommate to share his rooms at 221 B Baker St.
Dr. Watson was wounded by a bullet in the shoulder in the second Afghan War, which Holmes deduced at their first meeting.
Holmes would try to forget that the earth goes around the sun, because, he said, a man’s mind is like an attic which must be filled only with tools that he can use.
Watson’s Income…don’t know.
Holmes played the violin…of course!
LOL, you replied correctly to six and a half out of the eight questions.
It is true that Sherlock Holmes believed that the mind should be filled only with tools that one can use. That is the half-point. But, why did he think that?
OK, everyone else, what was the amount of the government pension which Dr. Watson received after he was invalided in England?
So will I…
According to a Google search, since I don’t have the stories at hand, Dr. Watson’s army pension was eleven shillings and sixpence a day.
Absolutely correct! Only 1/2 question left. Why did Sherlock Holmes only wish the attic filled with tools that a person can use?
Here it is! So that he could find them again.
” A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. ”
Astounding, the places Google will take you. What Sherlock Holmes could have done with it!
Yes, Holmes was afraid that either his mind would fill up so that for every new fact and old fact would be thrown out by the brain (according to his first case) or that, as you quoted, the brain’s organization of the facts would become so jumbled so as to not be able to find the information needed in a timely manner.
Thus, to remember that the Earth rotates around the Sun he considered to be useless knowledge. Of course, his lack of knowledge of trigenometry, and the lack of convenient photographs at the time of the writing of the novels, meant that he was not aware that an outdoor photograph could yield to him the height of the person and possibly either the time of the year in which the photograph was taken or the possible rough location of the photograph, depending on what other information (such as shadow length, etc.) was present in that photograph (given the inclination of the sun at certain times of the year, etc., etc.).
But, Holmes deliberately refused to learn information that he thought would overly fill his mind with unnecessary facts.