II
Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is not a utopia in the sense that I have explained our principle of selection in the preface to the bibliography. It is only a fragment, and not very good as fragments go; and it would drop out altogether from our survey were it not for the hugely overrated reputation that Bacon has as a philosopher of natural science—indeed, as the philosopher after Aristotle.
The greater part of Bacon’s ideas are anticipated and more amply expressed by Andreae. When we have deleted Bacon’s multitudinous prayers and exhortations, when we have disposed of his copious descriptions of jewels and velvets and satins and ceremonial regalia, we find that the core of his commonwealth is Salomon’s House, sometimes known as the College of the Six Days’ Works; which he describes as the noblest foundation that ever was upon earth, and the lantern of the kingdom.
The purpose of this foundation is the “knowledge of the causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” The material resources of this foundation are manifold. It has laboratories dug into the sides of hills, and observatories with towers half a mile high; it has great lakes of salt and fresh water which seem to anticipate the marine laboratories we know today; and it has engines for setting things in motion. Besides this, there are spacious houses where physical demonstrations are made, and sanatoria where various novel cures are attempted; there are experimental agricultural stations, too, where grafts and crosses are tried. Add to this pharmaceutical laboratories, industrial laboratories, and numerous houses devoted to such things as experiments with sounds, lights, perfumes, and tastes—which Bacon presents in a wild farrago without any regard to the essential sciences to which the work he describes is related—and one has a tally of the “riches of Salomon’s House.”
Twelve fellows of the college travel into foreign lands to bring back books and abstracts, and reports on experiments and inventions. Three make a digest of experiments. Three collect the experiments of all the mechanical arts, and also of practices which are not brought into the arts. Three try new experiments. Three devote themselves to classifications; and another three, known as dowry men or benefactors, look into the experiments of their fellows and cast about for means of applying them to human life and knowledge. Three fellows consult with the whole body of scientific workers and plan new channels of investigation; and three, who are called interpreters of nature, attempt to raise the results of particular investigations into general observations and axioms.
In telling all this, as in the rest of his New Atlantis, Bacon is incredibly childish and incoherent: he gives such a description of Salomon’s House as a six-year-old schoolboy might give of a visit to the Rockefeller Foundation. Beneath these maladroit interpretations, however, we see that Bacon had a grasp on some of the fundamentals of scientific research, and of the part that science might play in the “relief of man’s estate.” It is nothing more than a hint, this New Atlantis; but a word to the wise is enough; and as we look about the modern world we see that, in its material affairs at any rate, the great scientific institutes and foundations—the United States Bureau of Standards, for one—play a part not a little like that of the College of the Six Days’ Works.
Campanella with his dream of powerful mechanical inventions, in which he had been anticipated by Leonardo, and Bacon with his sketch of scientific institutes—with these two utopians we stand at the entrance to the utopia of means; that is to say, the place in which all that materially contributes to the good life has been perfected. The earlier utopias were concerned to establish the things which men should aim for in life. The utopias of the later Renaissance took these aims for granted and discussed how man’s scope of action might be broadened. In this the utopians only reflected the temper of their time; and did not attempt to remold it. As a result of our preoccupation with the means, we in the Western World live in an inventor’s paradise. Scientific knowledge and mechanical power we have to burn; more knowledge and more power than Bacon or Campanella could possibly have dreamed of. But today we face again the riddle that Plato, More, and Andreae sought to answer: what are men to do with their knowledge and power?
As we skip here and there through the Utopias of the next three centuries, this question gets more deeply impregnated in our minds.