And on and on. In his essay “Of Miracles” (1748), the Scottish philosopher David Hume writes that “the passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived.” More recently, the French philosopher Michel Foucault has written, “Curiosity pleases me. It evokes . . . a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities.”
