New Atlantis

Overview

New Atlantis is forty pages and it stops in the middle. Bacon wrote it around 1624 and died in 1626, and his chaplain William Rawley published it the next year with a note saying the rest was not perfected. What survives is a frame, a long piece of scene-setting, and then the passage everybody reads.

It is nominally a utopia, and it is instructive to see how little Bacon cares about the parts that usually fill one. More’s Utopia is mostly constitutional: property, magistrates, war, religion, the working day. Bensalem’s laws are sketched in a few paragraphs and then dropped. What Bacon wants to describe is an institution for producing knowledge, and once he reaches it he writes for twenty pages without a pause.

The unfinished state is also the most interesting thing about it. Rawley says Bacon had intended a model of laws for a commonwealth as well, and never wrote it. The book we have is therefore a utopia consisting almost entirely of its research division, which is either an accident of composition or the most honest thing about it.

Read it alongside the Novum Organum, which is the argument this is the advertisement for.

What happens

A ship out of Peru, bound across the Pacific for China and Japan, is driven off course and runs out of food and water. The crew, sick and expecting to die, sight land.

They are met with extreme caution. A boat approaches but will not come alongside; a scroll is handed over on a stick, written in several languages and signed with a cross, instructing them not to land. They are questioned about whether they are Christians, made to swear they have shed no blood in the last forty days, and then admitted to a quarantine building called the Strangers’ House, where they are fed, given medicine, and treated with a courtesy that unsettles them, since nobody will take payment.

The governor of the house explains the island. It is called Bensalem. Nineteen hundred years ago a king named Solamona, wanting to keep the country happy and self-sufficient, closed it to the world, with two exceptions: strangers in distress are cared for, and a small number of Bensalemites travel abroad in secret to gather knowledge. The island was converted to Christianity within twenty years of the Ascension, when a pillar of light appeared off the coast and an ark was found containing the scriptures and a letter.

Two domestic episodes follow. The narrator attends the Feast of the Family, a state-funded celebration given to any man who has thirty living descendants, with a ceremony, a scroll of honour and a blessing on the children. And a Jewish merchant named Joabin explains the island’s marriage customs, including a sharp aside about European chastity and a practical arrangement by which prospective couples are seen bathing by a friend of the other party before an engagement, which Bacon offers as an improvement on More.

Then the thing the book exists for. A Father of Salomon’s House arrives in the city in a procession, and grants the narrator a private audience. He describes the institution in five parts: its purpose, its facilities, its methods, its offices, and its rituals.

The facilities are a catalogue and the catalogue is the point. Deep caves for refrigeration and conservation; high towers for meteorology; artificial wells and lakes; chambers where air is made to cure diseases; orchards where plants are made to fruit out of season and species are changed deliberately; parks where animals are dissected alive to learn what can be done to human bodies, and bred into new kinds; brewhouses and kitchens producing drinks and foods with specific effects; dispensatories; engine-houses producing motions faster than musket-shot, flying machines and boats that go under water; perspective-houses for light and colour and lenses; sound-houses with artificial echoes and means of conveying sound in pipes over distances; perfume-houses; mathematical houses; and a house of deceits of the senses, kept so that its members will know how illusions are done and be forbidden to perform them.

The offices are the modern part. Twelve Merchants of Light travel abroad in disguise collecting experiments and books. Depredators collect from published work; Mystery-men from the crafts; Pioneers try new experiments; Compilers tabulate the results; Dowry-men look for practical uses; Lamps design the next round of experiments from what has been found; Inoculators carry them out; and three Interpreters of Nature raise the results into general axioms. That is a research pipeline with a peer group at every stage, and no one person doing more than a part.

The Father then blesses the narrator and gives him permission to publish the account, and the manuscript ends.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting, and read the Father’s speech twice. Everything before it is a runway.

Read the list of offices as an organisational chart and ask which of those jobs exist today. Most of them do, under different names, which is the single best argument for the book’s importance.

Notice the secrecy, and notice that Bacon does not treat it as sinister. Bensalem spies on the world, publishes selectively, and withholds some findings from its own government. A modern reader is likely to find that the most disturbing paragraph in the book. Bacon seems to offer it as prudence.

Weigh the catalogue against the date. Submarines, aircraft, refrigeration, artificial weather, selective breeding, loudspeakers, anaesthesia and genetic modification of plants are all in a book published in 1627. Some of it is fantasy in the manner of the age. A surprising amount is not.

The common misreading is to take the religious material as decoration. Bacon is careful to have Bensalem’s Christianity arrive by miracle and to have the Father of Salomon’s House bless the narrator, and the whole institution is framed as reading the book of God’s works alongside the book of his word. Whether that framing is conviction or protection is a fair question.

Questions it raises

• Salomon’s House decides for itself what to publish and keeps some findings from the state. Is that independence or an unaccountable power?
• The purpose is stated as the enlarging of the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible. Is there anything in the book that limits it?
• Bacon spends twenty pages on the laboratory and a paragraph on the laws. What kind of utopia is that?
• The island gathers knowledge from everywhere and gives nothing back. Can that arrangement be defended?
• Bensalem’s happiness rests on the Feast of the Family, strict marriage customs and a closed border. How much of the utopia is the science, and how much is the conservatism around it?
• Bacon left it unfinished. Does the book need the missing constitution, or is the fragment complete in the way that matters?