The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

We may conclude with some reflections on the relevance of Bacon’s fable to the England of his day. It was an England in which the problem of poverty was constantly discussed; in which the menace of plague produced a periodic exodus from London of those in a position to move; in which demonology, magic, and alchemy found a lodging in the minds of those in the highest offices of state. For such evils Bacon believed a remedy could be found in his philosophy of works. He took note of the fact that Mote, in his “Utopia’, could suggest no better remedy for poverty than fair shares in the little they had. Bacon foresaw, and he was right, that the application of science to industry could immeasurably multiply wealth. He observed that the doctors had inherited from Greek antiquity a very long list of incurable diseases. He suggested that it might prove possible to shorten the list, and he was right. He suggested that the reason for the flourishing of magic and alchemy lay in the fact that the philosophy prevalent in his age prided itself on its uselessness. To fight Scholasticism was to deprive Alchemy of its raison d’etre. Again he was right.

But how to establish the merits of his new philosophy? How even to get a hearing for it? The old had sufficed for centuries of argument whether on God or on Nature. But it had gone out of fashion, even before the monasteries which provided it with the material conditions in which it could flourish, had been suppressed. For practical purposes it was useless. The new Platonism of Ficino imported from Florence was equally unserviceable. Aristotle had given the monks something to argue about. Plato was now supplying the same function for the gentry, the new class of idlers, which had come into existence on the lands from which the monks had been expelled. Where could one turn for some sounder form of knowledge? Even the reformed Church could not supply it. “The boundary of our Faith,’ said Bacon’s good friend, Lancelot Andrewes, ‘was to be found in one Canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, and the series of Fathers in that period.’ Bacon agreed. Romish innovations had to be removed. But where, in the first five centuries of the history of the Church was to be found a natural philosophy on which the life of Britain could be based in the age of trans-oceanic navigation, and of the

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