There are two types of thinkers: those who look to confirm their beliefs and those who are open to change their beliefs

"The fox knows many things, 

but the hedgehog knows one big thing"

-- Archilochus, 700 BC.

The metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog gives a sense of "the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers and maybe human beings in general":

Hedgehogs

• Relate everything to a single central vision
• One system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance
• Seek to fit [experiences and objects] into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.
• Examples: Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust

Foxes

• Pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle
• Lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal
• Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves
• Examples: Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce

Full essay from Sir Isaiah Berlin

Photo: Edgar Arceneaux "Huckleberry Finn"