human wonder

If to talk about wonders, the first wonder that should be mentioned is a human being. Fortunately or not, they possess ability to think and reason, which easily allows them to think superior of themselves in comparison to the rest of living creatures on the planet. With the superiority in mind it is only natural that humans desire control. Classification of all living and non-living things into systems is an easy way to establish hierarchy and to keep things in order.
However, human mind does not exist on its own, but follows common biological organization of many other mammals, and maybe it is in this animalistic beginning where the answer to human fear lies. Humans have a lot of knowledge and over time acquire more and more but they fear the yet unknown. People’s imagination runs wild coming up with possible things of existence. Of course made-up things do not follow the familiar patterns, and therefore are scary. It is comforting to take a working system of classification and plug the unfamiliar in it. Faking familiar system’s elements makes the content of it look believable. It is now wondrous but not alien. Such approach to “wonder” satisfies both a hungry desire for knowledge and inferior feeling before the unknown. The two articles show that this approach was happening during Renaissance and Post-Modernism times. In my opinion it doesn’t matter what time the “wonder” happens in or whether it touches the field of science or art, people will continue creating methods of classification because it is the way they have been making sense of the world for ages.