by Edward O. Wilson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, 332 pp.

E. O. Wilson is one of the most important intellectuals of our time. He is a scientific leader, well known for his work on ants and his cocreation (with Robert MacArthur) of the theory of island biogeography. Unlike many scientific leaders, Wilson also has vigorously participated in the public forum. In the 1970s, he was vilified as a reactionary or racist because of his championing of human sociobiology. In the 1980s, he emerged as a leading advocate for protecting biodiversity. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books are in such demand that the initial press run of Consilience is 50,000 copies. Wilson's voice is one to be reckoned with.

The present book is a brief for the unity of knowledge. Drawing on extensive reading, Wilson devotes chapters to religion, ethics, the arts, the social sciences, and the mind, as well as biology. Consilience, according to Wilson, is the key to unity, but he is not very clear about what he means by this term. He uses it in various ways, referring to "the consilient world view," "consilient explanation," "consilience by synthesis," "the consilience of the disciplines", "the consilience program", "the consilience argument," the "criterion of consilience," and the "consilient perspective."

The term "consilience" was coined by the nineteenth-century British philosopher and scientist William Whewell, as part of the phrase "the consilience of inductions." According to Whewell, the consilience of inductions takes place when an induction obtained from one class of facts coincides with an induction obtained from a different class. This consilience is a test of the truth of the theory in which it occurs. One of his examples of the consilience of inductions was Newton's use of Kepler's laws in explaining the central force of the sun and the precession of the equinoxes. Such consilience provides evidence for the truth of the hypothesis on which the prior induction is based. In Whewell's thought, it had little or nothing to do with the unity of knowledge. Indeed, given his religiosity, conservatism, and opposition to the theory of evolution, it is clear that Whewell would have opposed Wilson's scientism,...