“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” – Sherlock Holmes

A quote from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, from a passage where Doyle asserts that the human mind, properly medicated, is more powerful than the supernatural. After sneering at a supposed man of science’s tale of the spectral hound, he sends Watson off for the day so he can apply his mind to the case. On Watson’s return to a room dense with tobacco smoke, obviously emitted by a man who has not left his London rooms, he asserts that he has traveled to the location of the crime, in Devonshire. “In spirit?” Watson asks.

“Exacty. My body has remained in this arm-chair, and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.”