We have an impulse to seek knowledge at higher and higher levels, defined by ever more general categories of things. Once we have started on this search for higher and higher categories and essences, there are three possible alternatives:
1. The world may not be systematically organized, or we may not be able to know it, above a certain level of generalization, which might even be relatively low in the hierarchy of categories. In other words, there may be a limit to the systematicity of the world or to its intelligibility.
2. The hierarchy of categories may go on indefinitely, with no level at which an all-inclusive category exists. In this case, the world might be systematic, but not completely intelligible. The process of gaining knowledge of the world would be an infinite, and hence uncompleteable, task.
3. The iteration up the hierarchy of categories and essences might terminate with an all-inclusive category, whose essence would explain the nature of all things. Only in his case would the world be totally intelligible, at least in principle.
The endlessly optimistic scientists presuppose no. 3. Why? Scientists should be skeptical and wary, yet they have chosen the least skeptical, most hopeful and idealized alternative. I see no reason to, except wishful thinking. I'm personally inclined towards alternative 2, myself.
This is not really a question about science per se but about the metaphysical assumptions underlying any search for knowledge. For there is already this presupposed all-inclusive category in metaphysics: being. The main difference between 2 and 3 is that 2 rejects 'being' as a meaningful category. 3 brings with itself a metaphysical presupposition, that there is a category of Being, and since there is also a common metaphysical theory of essences (all things have a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is), it follows that Being must have an essence, so there is an Essence of Being. (2) rejects this, and this I see as the main boon of this approach.
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