The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

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PREFACE

Dimitrije Mitrinovié plainly had Francis Bacon’s Utopia in mind when he gave the name of New Atlantis to the school he founded. But two other motives guided his choice of the name, both of which, as it happens, would have had Bacon’s sympathetic approval. Bacon, as well as he, turned a searching glance back to the lost Atlantis of Plato. For the author of The Wisdom of the Ancients, more often thought of now as the trumpeter of the new world, had a deep interest in the fables which are the oldest part of our literary inheritance. ‘If their age be in question’ he writes, ‘then their remote antiquity deserves the highest veneration; or, if we consider the form in which their teaching is conveyed, then a fable is as it were a kind of ark in which the most _ priceless knowledge is wont to be bestowed.’ Turning now to the future we find Francis Bacon and Mitrinovic united in a common concern. Bacon helped to pioneer the new Atlantic world into which Mitrinovié was born and in which he believed. Both recognised in the scientific technology and Christian charity of the new age elements of hope denied to the ancient world. The

paper that follows is directed to the defence of that hope. B. Farrington

Lymington, December 1964