ABSTRACT

A landscape can be boring if looked at for a long time: a snow-covered plain viewed from a train window, for example, can become boring because of its monotony and absence of contrasts. Curiosity, like boredom, is a uniquely human quality the human quality par excellence. Like boredom and the quality of being boring, curiosity and the quality of being interesting - that is an object of curiosity can be attributed respectively to our experience of objects and to the objects themselves; the one cannot exist without the other. War, for example, is a dreadful thing, but it is not boring; the eagerness to fight, and the instincts aroused in battle, are good antidotes to boredom, and must have been among the causes of many wars.