“The wisest of men will appear as an ape compared with God in wisdom, beauty, and all other things.”Heraclit · Fragmente · -500 · Fragmente, DK B83
Measured against the divine, humanity's highest wisdom remains monkeyish.
Heraclit places man in cosmic perspective: even the wisest of men is, before God, what the ape is before man, inferior in wisdom, beauty, and everything else. The mechanism is the same logic of comparative scales, but applied vertically, not between species. A genius scientist who imagines a question exhausted discovers, a generation later, that he only touched its surface.
Why it matters An antidote to intellectual arrogance: use it when you or someone else is about to declare a field closed.