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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How do Gnostics and alchemists view snakes?
(a) As symbols of eternal life.
(b) As symbols of destruction and re-creation.
(c) As symbols of the old order of gods.
(d) As symbols of divinity.

2. What is reductionism?
(a) The use of abstractions and generalizations to explain phenomena.
(b) The analysis of components of a system or problem.
(c) The analysis of the interrelation of all the parts of a system or problem.
(d) The study of the context for a system or problem.

3. What force did John Locke believe in, in Wilson's account?
(a) The nurturing force of the environment.
(b) The therapeutic force of society.
(c) The damaging force of society.
(d) The civilizing force of discipline.

4. What does Wilson distinguish between?
(a) Science and religion.
(b) Religion and myth.
(c) Science and pseudo-science.
(d) Science and ethics.

5. Where do government policies typically originate, in Wilson's account?
(a) In majority rule.
(b) In popular consensus.
(c) In politicians' thinking.
(d) In experts in each field or region.

6. What did Descartes argue for, in Wilson's account?
(a) The separation of mind and matter.
(b) The unification knowledge.
(c) Universal peace.
(d) The integration of historical will and individual will.

7. What do the laws of physics transcend, in Wilson's account?
(a) Mythologies.
(b) Languages.
(c) Galaxies.
(d) Cultures.

8. What religion was Wilson born into?
(a) Catholicism.
(b) Protestantism.
(c) Southern Baptism.
(d) Judaism.

9. How does Wilson characterize the relationship between ecology and ethics?
(a) Without analysis in ecology, there is little basis for making ethical claims.
(b) By studying how people assign values, we find that ecology has always had an ethical scale of value.
(c) Without tangible laws of ethics, ecology is always an approximate science, ethically.
(d) By valuing previously unvalued phenomena, ecology develops its own unique ethics.

10. What do the natural science stimulate, in Wilson's account?
(a) Industry.
(b) Other sciences.
(c) Religious controversy.
(d) Radicalism.

11. What does science seek, in Wilson's account?
(a) Objective truth based on hypothesis.
(b) Interesting hypotheses.
(c) Probably hypothesis.
(d) The mind of God.

12. What does Wilson say was the consequence of Robespierre's employment of the concept of the general will?
(a) Napoleon rose to power.
(b) The French undermined their own revolution.
(c) The French went to war with Russia.
(d) 17,000 Frenchmen were killed.

13. What benefit does Wilson say consilience has?
(a) It translates science into humanities and vice versa.
(b) It allows facts and theories to be tested.
(c) It provides a Rosetta Stone for the sciences.
(d) It describes the humanities in scientific terms.

14. What does Wilson say matters in science?
(a) Paradigm shifts.
(b) Hypothesis.
(c) Publications.
(d) Final results.

15. In Wilson's account, why did the French Revolution fail?
(a) Because of international fear of the spread of revolution.
(b) Because the efficiency of the military in the Reign of Terror allowed Napoleon's rise.
(c) Because of the excesses of tyrants and terrorists.
(d) Because of the intellectual opposition to the tyranny of the revolution.

Short Answer Questions

1. What event marks the end of the Enlightenment, in Wilson's account?

2. How does Wilson characterize the relationship between consilience and the material world?

3. What does Wilson call the discrete pieces of evidence?

4. What idea of Locke's survived the Enlightenment into Romanticism?

5. How does consilience work?

(see the answer keys)

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