The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

THE NEW ATLANTIS OF FRANCIS BACON

The technological revolution has not been an unqualified success. Materially we are much better off, spiritually we are in great disorder. If we give Francis Bacon the credit for the material progress, should we not lay upon his shoulders the blame for the spiritual disorder? It is true that he always insisted that power over nature was neither good nor evil in itself. Everything depended, in his view, on the new power being governed in charity. His prayer was that a greater light in nature might not darken our understanding of the divine mysteries. But these wise cautions have not availed to exempt him from blame. It is charged against him that he debased the spiritual currency of our speech.

T. S. Eliot diagnosed a subtle disease of the spirit which set in in the seventeenth century. He named it dissociation of sensibility. This clinical term means, if I have understood it, that men then learned to think without feeling. Professor L. C. Knights in his volume of seventeenth-century studies, ‘Explorations’, examines Bacon’s contribution to the dissemination of this disease and has no doubt of his guilt. He admits that the creation of a scientific language, to which Bacon contributed, was ‘a necessary step forward if the English language was to be made, what it was not in Elizabethan times, a tool for scientific analysis.’ But, in its context, this has an ominous ring. It is like saying that it is necessary that offences come, but woe to him through whom the

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