When he's in this mood, his sense of things is much closer to the Baptism he tells us he was raised in than to the 'Ionian' worldview that he tells us he admires. That the news about the human condition might turn out to be simply awful is not a possibility that he appears prepared to contemplate. It does not accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brain works. Still, 'Goethe can be easily forgiven. I'm so glad, because I do rather like some of his poems.
Science is the characteristic product of our culture.
As of now, the hardest part is to reconcile a physicalistic ontology with the apparently ineliminable multiplicity of discourses that we require when we try to say how things are. Wilson thinks this appearance of tension is unreal. He suspects that if we resist consilience, that's because we're suffering from pluralism, nihilism, solipsism, relativism, idealism, deconstructionism and other symptoms of the French disease. Well, maybe, but I for one plead not guilty. It seems to me that scientific Realism is quite compatible with the view that events fall into revealing and reliable patterns not just at the level of micro structure but at many different orders of aggregation of matter.