Conan Doyle's Beliefs

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Conan Doyle's Beliefs is an article published in The New-York Times on 9 november 1930.

Review of Arthur Conan Doyle's essay The Edge of the Unknown (1929).


Conan Doyle's Beliefs

The New-York Times (9 november 1930, section 4, p. 32)

The Edge of the Unknown.
By Arthur Conan Doyle. 332 pp. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.50.


There is a double significance in the title of this last work from the pen of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. for much of it was written as he approached the verge of death. It contains fifteen articles, all of them dealing with one or another subject connected with his well-known belief in the survival of personality after death and in the actuality of communication between the two banks of the dark river. The first one is a discussion of the character and powers of Houdini, which brings Sir Arthur to the conclusion that probably the magician possessed a psychic gift which, if it had been developed, would have made him a great medium and by the help of which he did many of his mysterious tricks. Other articles deal with some of the author's personal experiences with mediums and spirit manifestations; with his conviction that events in passing leave such an impress upon material surroundings that long afterward their influence can be felt, heard and even seen; with the strange letters that came to him; with the possibility of defining the laws that regulate psychic affairs; with posthumous writings; with the evidence for the existence all about us of elemental forms of life invisible to the normal human eye. These and other themes he diseases with his well-known absolute conviction of the truth of what he believed to be genuine spiritistic phenomena.