3. The Utopia of Lord Chancellor Bacon

One year after the death of James, his sometime Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, also died. Among his papers was the fragment of a Utopia, the New Atlantis, written in Latin. It is interesting to examine the social ideas of this cultured philosopher one hundred years after the appearance of More’s Utopia.

The title of the work relates to the mythical Atlantis of the ancients mentioned by Plato in Timaeus. Just as the tradition of a great continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules almost suggested an early knowledge of the existence of America, so Bacon’s New Atlantis has been supposed to hint at the existence of the Australian Continent.

Bacon’s New Atlantis describes a model community engaged in scientific and technical pursuits rather than a social Utopia, and subsumes the technological speculations of the foremost thinker of his time. The social and moral side of the narrative is tedious and uninspiring compared with the bold swing of More’s Utopia. “Bensalem”, as the “New Atlantis” is called by its inhabitants, seems to be but little different from seventeenth-century Europe, and presents all the social categories of property, property distinctions, classes, priests, an official hierarchy, and a king who is both wise and absolute. The only touch of originality is an order of learned men devoted mainly to industrial experiments. The institute of these savants, “King Solomon’s House”, is a centre for the cultivation of useful knowledge, and one of the fathers of the order, in his enumeration of the directions, arrangements, and contrivances of the house, sketches the scientific Utopia of Bacon. The name Solomon was a compliment to James I, whose flatterers often compared him with the Jewish King.

A family festival attended by the narrator of the “New Atlantis” depicts a family resembling that of Bacon’s time, but somewhat idealized and organized on patriarchal lines. We learn that in Bensalem rigid monogamy and the strictest chastity reign. Marriages contracted without parental consent, while not invalid, entailed partial disinheritance on the children. All of which was very reassuring to the comfortable classes of the period, for whose edification a corrective is administered to More. “I have read in a book of one of your men, of a feigned commonwealth”, says a Jew (religious toleration being the rule in Bensalem) to the narrator, “where the married couple are permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked. This they (the inhabitants of the ‘New Atlantis’) dislike; for they think it a scorn to give a refusal after so familiar knowledge, but because of many hidden defects in men and women’s bodies, they have a more civil way.” A friend or relation of one of the “high contracting parties” may see the other bathe.

In the “New Atlantis” of Bacon, the ardent advocate of the realistic and inductive method of inquiry, religion plays a much greater, much more obtrusive part than in the Utopia of the Catholic More.

In one respect only does Bacon’s imagination soar, and that is in the enormous volume of the wealth of the “New Atlantis”, the abundance of its means of enjoyment. The inmates of the House of Solomon do not pass their days in abstract speculation; they experiment, calculate, and produce. It is a Utopia with emphasis on the aspect of production, thus chiming in with the intellectual tendencies of the clearest thinkers amongst the middle class of the period, and presents no essential modifications in the modes of production and distribution. The description of Solomon’s House begins: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

In an age of discoveries Bacon stands forth as the herald of an epoch of the great industrial inventions. This is indeed no small thing, but it involves a contracting of the social horizon, as individual utility is the immediate concern. This explains the paucity of ideas in all that relates to social organization as a whole. Bacon’s Utopia reveals the progress which modern industrial doctrine had already made in his time.