Heraclitus again, and Rain Man (yes, the movie)

One thing that you should know about Heraclitus is that he was not completely opposed to polymathy. Remember that he was really focused on not just whether you knew things, but whether you had wisdom. Wisdom was a really big thing in those days.

So modern scholars now believe that Heraclitus was merely arguing that polymathy alone will not bring understanding.

Also, Heraclitus explicitly vacillated on polymathy, as he also said, “Men who love wisdom [philosophos, the origin of the word philosophy]  must be good inquirers into many things indeed.”  The best reconciliation of these ostensibly opposing arguments is that Heraclitus felt that the seeker of wisdom and understanding must know how to separate important facts from unimportant facts, which the pure polymath did not. Thus, it seems that the pure polymath, to Heraclitus, was just someone who went around acquiring facts without ever trying to analyze them. That was bad in those days, and it probably isn’t so good today.

As an example of that, think of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man. He sure knew a lot of things, but he was unable to analyze them even in the slightest.