ABSTRACT
There have been few men in any century who could claim that they knew everything that there was to know in their own time. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, each in his own way, might have been said to have possessed global knowledge. And whether or not they knew all that there was to know in their time, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson applied so well what they did know that they certainly can be said to have dominated the thinking of their own time. In our own time, in this last quarter of the twentieth century, few men can be thought of as even knowing most of what there is to know in their own specific field of endeavor. Buckminster Fuller assures us that he knows all there is to know that is worth bothering about, but some would argue with this assessment. Arnold Toynbee lays claim to an enormous command of the details of history and philosophy, a claim that, unlike Fuller’s, does not seem excessive. A startling example of a man who has digested terrifying masses of data in widely differing fields is Immanuel Velikovsky, the author of Worlds in Collision and other provocative books. Nevertheless, polymaths are few and far between, if in fact there are any at all. It is evident certainly that almost no one in our own time matches the description.
