The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense.

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own
devising rather than to understand and explain it.

The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window
whose name is not ignorance but wonder.

The timid mind shuts this window with a bang, and is silent
and thoughtless about what it does not know in order to chatter
the more about what it thinks it knows. It fills up the uncharted
spaces with mere repetition of what has already been explored.
But the open mind knows that the most minutely explored
territories have not really been known at all, but only marked
and measured a thousand times over. And the fascinating mystery
of what it is that we mark and measure must in the end “tease us
out of thought” until the mind forgets to circle and to pursue its own processes, and becomes aware that to be at this moment is pure miracle.

In ways that differ but little, this is the last word of Western and Eastern wisdom alike. The Hindu Upanishads say:
He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God
is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not. God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all.

Goethe says it in words which, to the modern mind, may be
plainer:
The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity