The Hedgehog and the Fox: An essay on Tolstoy's view of history by Isaiah Berlin

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" -- Archilochus

Perhaps there are two types of thinkers:

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

one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete,

at times fanatical, unitary inner vision

Berlin includes in this group of thinkers the following people.

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.
Foxes 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 [the objects] are in themselves,
without, consciously or unconsciously,
seeking to fit them [the objects] into, or exclude them from,
any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete,
at times fanatical, unitary inner vision
Berlin includes the following people as foxes:
Shakespeare
Herodotus
Aristotle
Montaigne
Erasmus
Moliere
Goethe
Pushkin
Balzac
Joyce

But when it comes to Tolstoy, Berlin proposes that it is difficult to classify him as either hedgehog or fox because Tolstoy himself was not unaware of the division, and did his best to falsify the answer.
"Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog".
Berlin states that his gifts and achievement are one thing, his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievement, another. His ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing or should be doing.

Then the meat of the essay hinges on the proposition that the conflict between what he was and what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history.

And I still have to read the essay...
I just wanted to get this bit out about the introduction because it is the framework I used for my medical school personal statement.