The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

But I cannot but remember that in the great variety of religious experiences there are some that do not fit easily under the title of ‘Surprised by Joy’. Francis Bacon experienced and lived a truth of which Lewis seems to have had no inkling. It was, moreover, a Christian truth, if we may judge by the enthusiasm with which it was regarded by George Herbert and John Milton.

Before I turn to Bacon himself I think I should mention one more critic, Professor Basil Willey and his book ‘The English Moralists’, published this year. He differs from Lewis in regarding Bacon as a hypocrite rather than an ass. But like C. S. Lewis he takes a text from the description of Solomon’s House in the New Atlantis. Of this Bacon had said that its purpose was the ‘effecting of all things possible’. Like Lewis, Willey finds in the phrase ‘a touch of hubris’. Like Lewis he backs up the charge by reminding us that Bacon had called himself the trumpeter of the new age. Like Lewis he omits to tell us that by this title Bacon had the modest intention of claiming only to be a bugler on a field of battle where the real fight would be waged and won by others. Like Lewis, Willey links Bacon’s name with that of Faust. In short, it is all part of the same song, the one refreshing novelty being that Willey seems to have misgivings, either about what he is himself saying or perhaps about the company he is in; for he keeps interrupting himself to say ‘Let us be fair to Bacon’ or “To be just to Bacon’—four times in a short study. Would it not have been simpler to scrap the essay, decide to be fair from the start and avoid the necessity for so many apologies? And now to our subject.

‘The New Atlantis’, a short incomplete fable, given to the world by William Rawley after Bacon’s death, tells of a visit of an English ship to the island continent of Bensalem somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. It is now chiefly remembered for its description of Solomon’s House. This Rawley tells us was devised by Bacon as ‘a model of a college instituted for the interpretation of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men’. Nowadays it is often said that the model was ‘realized in the Royal Society’. Now this is not true, or at best only half true. Solomon’s House filled a place in the life of the kingdom of Bensalem unlike that which the

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