Miracles

From Latin 'miraculum', 'an object of wonder.' They were a source of the aesthetics of the marvelous; links with prodigies and portents.

Prodigies

Examples of the intervention of God or the Devil in the rational/divine/natural order of things. Includes comets and monstrous births. Ancient peoples considered the birth of "freaks" representations of the wrath of the gods, a demonstration, as it were. The first so-named monstra were the showpieces in traveling carnival freakshows, people afflicted with body deformities or diseases like elephantiasis.

Curiosity

'This is what prolongs the troubles of those afflicted with blind curiosity, i.e., those who seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them, for gradually they become so full of wonder that things of no importance are no less apt to arrest their attention than those whose investigation is more useful'
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, pp. 354-56.





Wonder

'This is what prolongs the troubles of those afflicted with blind curiosity, i.e., those who seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them, for gradually they become so full of wonder that things of no importance are no less apt to arrest their attention than those whose investigation is more useful' see The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, pp. 354-56. Montaigne: "Iris is the daughter of Thaumas. Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress, ignorance its end" (Essays, p. 788)