Creative critique and anthropo-philosophy

“THE NEW ATLANTIS FOUNDATION

Tur name New Atlantis was given by Dimitrije Mitrinovié to the school which he founded. He delivered certain most important lectures concerning the work of the school during the Spring and Summer of 1941 at 115 Gower Street. The New Atlantis Foundation has been established to continue this work.

The name has three significant meanings or references.

It refers to the ancient continent Atlantis, well known to mythology and perhaps most famous from Plato’s reference to it in the Timaeus. Tradition tells us that in those days, before the mighty empire of China and before Noah and the flood, mankind lived intuitively and knew by intuition much that we have subsequently learnt by thought and observation. It may well be that they knew much that we have not yet learnt in modern times.

Indeed those psychologists whose concern is with the human soul, and particularly Dr C. G. Jung, have shown us how the very patterns and symbols which fill the ancient scriptures and seem so strange to commonsense lie deep in the human unconscious even today and reveal themselves in our dreams. And if there is any truth in the assertion by the writer of the Book of Genesis that God made man in his own image these may be intuitive premonitions of truths about the working of the Universe which are yet to be discovered in full consciousness.

A new method of knowledge may be needed which does not deny the critical’ intellectual consciousness we have gained but adds to it also intuitive knowledge.

The second reference is to the ‘New Atlantis’ of Francis Bacon, in which he describes his Eutopian vision of the House of Solomon as ‘the noblest foundation that was ever upon the earth, dedicated to the Study of the Works and Creatures of God’, the aim of which was ‘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’.

Of the significance of this idea for the modern world Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins spoke in his presidential address to the British Association in 1933 as follows:

“insofar as Francis Bacon visualised therein an organisation of the best intellects

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