VI Science and Utopia

SUCH an organization of science is Bacon’s notion of Utopia. He gives us in The New Atlantis, in plain strong prose, a picture of a state in which this organization has reached the national stage. It is a state nominally ruled by a king (Bacon never forgets that he is a loyal subject and counsellor of James I); but “preëminent amongst the excellent acts of the king ... was the erection and institution of an Order or Society which we call Solomon’s House; the noblest foundation, as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the nature of all things.”¹ Every twelve years this Order sends out to all parts of the world “merchants of light”; men who remain abroad for twelve years, gather information and suggestions in every field of art and science, and then (the next expedition having brought men to replace them) return home laden with books, instruments, inventions, and ideas. “Thus, you see, we maintain a trade not for gold, silver or jewels; nor for silk; nor for spices; nor for any other commodity or matter; but only for God’s first creation, which was Light.”² Meanwhile at home there is a busy army filling many laboratories, experimenting in zoölogy, medicine, dietetics, chemistry, botany, physics, and other fields; there are, in addition to these men, “three that collect the experiments in all the books; ... three that try new experiments”; three that tabulate the results of the experimenters; “three that look into the experiments of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use ... for man’s life; ... three that direct new experiments”; three that from the results draw up “observations, axioms, and aphorisms.”³ “We imitate also the flights of birds; we have some degree of flying in the air; we have ships and boats for going under water.”⁴ And the purpose of it all, he says, with fine Baconian ring, is “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”⁵