I had experienced the Ionian Enchantment. That recently coined expression I borrow from the physicist and historian Gerald Holton. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences —a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws. Its roots go back to Thales of Miletus, in Ionia, in the sixth century B.C.
(Edward O. Wilson: p. 4)
It is, after all, the same idea behind the project of the Enlightenment, the assumption that behind all the chaos of nature lies a basic order that can be discovered by the human mind. Today's theory of everything takes inspiration in the very same approach too. It states the belief in a concept, a unifying story that ultimately makes sense of it all. It's a position obviously set against the more pessimistic postmodern philosophy that became popular in the 1980s. Yet, the most intriguing aspect of all this, I think, is that Wilson's "belief in the unity of the sciences" is no different than a faith, really. There is little difference between this and religious faith, on the other hand. He remains convinced that "the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws", but there is nothing like a proof beyond any doubt that this view is indeed correct. One could certainly argue that there are reasonable arguments that would seem to agree with Wilson's approach —as a matter of fact, that's what he spends most of the book doing, offering those very arguments—, but they are short of definite and beyond any doubt. Ironically enough, then, those who fall for the Ionian Enchantment cannot explain reasonably well why they believe in this underlying unity of reality.
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