In “How Wonder Works,” in Aeon Magazine, City University philosopher Jesse Prinz offers an instructive contrast between the view of political philosopher Adam Smith and that of early scientist Francis Bacon on the value of wonder:
My favourite definition of wonder comes from the 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith, better known for first articulating the tenets of capitalism. He wrote that wonder arises ‘when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance’. Smith associated this quality of experience with a distinctive bodily feeling — ‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’.
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Smith’s analysis appears in his History of Astronomy (1795). In that underappreciated work, he proposed that wonder is crucial for science. Astronomers, for instance, are moved by it to investigate the night sky. He might have picked up this idea from the French philosopher René Descartes, who in his Discourse on the Method (1637) described wonder as the emotion that motivates scientists to investigate rainbows and other strange phenomena. In a similar spirit, Socrates said that philosophy begins in wonder: that wonder is what leads us to try to understand our world. In our own time, Richard Dawkins has portrayed wonder as a wellspring from which scientific inquiry begins. Animals simply act, seeking satiation, safety and sex. Humans reflect, seeking comprehension.
For a less flattering view, we turn to the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method. He called wonder ‘broken knowledge’ — a mystified incomprehension that science alone could cure. But this mischaracterises science and wonder alike. Scientists are spurred on by wonder, and they also produce wondrous theories. The paradoxes of quantum theory, the efficiency of the genome: these are spectacular. Knowledge does not abolish wonder; indeed, scientific discoveries are often more wondrous than the mysteries they unravel. Without science, we are stuck with the drab world of appearances. With it, we discover endless depths, more astounding that we could have imagined.
Unfortunately, the essay goes downhill from there, as Prinz tries his hand at Darwinizing wonder, according to how early man supposedly lived. Read it and sleep.
Fictional Darwinian sociology is not the same as knowing much about how early man lived, let alone charting the evolution of wonder.
Note: The first commenter makes a similar point.