A fragment attributed to the classical Greek poet Archilocus reads as follows, "... the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing ...". The twentieth-century literary historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in an essay of Tolstoy's view of history, suggested that it could be applied to categorize western thinkers as either hedgehogs or as foxes. The hedgehogs subordinate everything to one central idea and arrange and subordinate their concepts and views of everything around it, while the foxes are far too alert to the complexities, contradictions, and varieties, which characterize the world, to ever be able to restrict their thinking to one central principle. According to this categorization, Plato was obviously a hedgehog, while Aristotle was a fox; Shakespeare and obvious fox, while Marx was without a doubt a hedgehog. Some may be easy to identify, while others are not.
For some - which people may be free to speculate or argue about - reason, the pro- science and reason and therefore critical of the idea of God group on these boards are most likely hedgehogs, while their opponents are likely foxes. I plead guilty of being a fox. Both groups have a valid point of view and neither is likely to be able to convince the other to abandon their natural inclination and see the world according to the other group's point of view. As Berlin shows in his thought-provoking essay, Tolstoy was by nature a fox but he tried to understand history as a hedgehog. Nevertheless, the fox in him always foiled the effort. Try as they might, foxes cannot see the world as hedgehogs, or vice versa.
