The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

offence cometh. For Bacon, according to Professor Knights, dealt poetry a deadly blow. “There is never any indication’, he tells us, ‘that Bacon was moved by poetry or that he attaches any value to its power of deepening and refining the emotions.’ It would be useless to direct Professor Knights to that passage where Bacon says that ‘poetry serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation’; and that ‘it has ever been thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things’. Professor Knights, of course, knows the passage and even quotes it. But he allows it no force. Rather, he goes on to assert that ‘Bacon ignores completely the creative and vital forces in the mind itself.’ This is untrue, The whole question was gone into throughly by Coleridge a hundred and fifty years ago, when Bacon was better understood in England than he is today. (See “The Friend’, Section 11, Essay 9). His conclusion is that Bacon often expressed and everywhere supposed the existence, potentially or actually, in every rational being, of the pure reason, the spirit, the dry light, the intellectual intuition, call it what you will, in which are to be found the indispensable conditions of all science, and scientific research, whether meditative, contemplative, or experimental. What one may most deplore in Baconian studies in England, is not that they make no progress but that they are in decline.(')

But, if we are disappointed in Professor Knights, what are we to make of the late Professor C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Lewis, if I may call him by the title which will best identify him? In his spiritual autobiography, ‘Surprised by Joy’, a lively work like all that ever came from his able pen, he confides to us: ‘I thought Bacon (to speak frankly) a solemn pretentious ass’. Elsewhere he proceeds to give the grounds for this opinion. In his ‘English Literature in the XVI Century’, Lewis discusses Renaissance magic, examines Bacon in this context, and concludes that he was hardly distinguishable from a magician. “Bacon’s endeavour,’ he tells us, ‘is no doubt contrasted in our minds with that of the magicians; but contrasted only in the light of the event, only because we know

(!) For a notable exception see Anne Righter’s study on Bacon in The English Mind, ed. Hugh Sykes Davis and George Watson. C.U.P., 1964.

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