Man is not adapted to live in a
mirror-lined box, generating his own electric light and sending for selected
images from outside when he needed them. Darkness and bad smell are all that
can come from that. We need a vast world, and it must be a world that does not
need us; a world constantly capable of surprising us, a world we did not
program, since only such a world is the proper object of wonder.
From
the 1978 book Beast and Man by
the English moral
philosopher Mary Midgley (born
1919).