A firm belief in the project of the Enlightenment.

Wilson is obviously a fan of the Englightenment. How else could anyone defend the idea of consilience? From a traditional religious approach, the world is a fundamentally a mystery, something created by a superior Being and beyond our comprehension. From a more contemporary postmodern approach, God may be out of the picture but the end result is still the same: reality is either impossible to comprehend or, on the contrary, a mosaic put together from thousands, millions of different viewpoints, which once again renders the task impossible. Against that vital pessimism, Wilson prefers to affirm the foundations of the project of the Enlightenment:

I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right the first time. The assumption they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. (...) Consilience is the key to unification. (...) The only way either to establish or to refute consilience is by methods developed in the natural science —not, I hasten to add, an effort led by scientists, or frozen in mathematical abstraction, but rather one allegiant to the habits of thought that have worked so well in exploring the material universe.

(Edward O. Wilson: pp. 8-9)

In a world taken over by the New Age craze, creationism, cultural relativism and superstitions of all types, it's certainly nice to read such a firm statement in favor of the intellectual project that brought about democracy, tolerance and social progress, among many other things. It's not a very trendy position to take, but it's now more necessary than ever.