ABSTRACT
All the varieties of detection considered in the previous chapter have one thing in common: all demand of the reader a rapid summary judgment whether a story is true or false. Most would-be detectors, though, lack the ability to survey the whole case in a glance. Samuel Johnson acknowledges that a few “gigantick and stupendous intelligences … are said to grasp a system by intuition, and bound forward from one series of conclusions to another, without regular steps through intermediate propositions.” Most people, though, have to “make their advances in knowledge by short flights between each of which the mind may lie at rest.”1 Perhaps a genius like Isaac Newton-at least the Newton of myth-could see an entire system at once, could grasp intuitively all the facts that determined the shape of the universe. Lesser mortals had to be content with shedding light on only a small part of the whole. They could hope to answer large questions only by beginning with small pieces of evidence.
