Blaise Pascal, the French intellectual giant and probable polymath
who sadly died young, advocated for polymathy in his posthumous Pensées, where he
wrote, “Since we cannot be universal and know all that is to be known of
everything, we ought to know a little about everything. For it is far better to
know something about everything than to know all about one thing. This
universality is the best. If we can have both, still better; but if we must
choose, we ought to choose the former.”
And the great English philosopher John Locke echoed Pascal, writing
in the "Universality" section of his Conduct of the Understanding,
that "taking a taste of every sort of knowledge ... is certainly very
useful and necessary to form the mind." He noted also that it was "an
excellency indeed, and a great one too, to have a real and true knowledge in
all or most of the objects of contemplation."
But certainly people have condemned polymathy and knowing
too much, and we'll look at that in the future.
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