I

For those who have come to question the openness to technological innovation that has come almost to define the modern (“developed”) nation, the quest for understanding leads, sooner or later, to the thought of Francis Bacon. For whatever one's position on the controversies surrounding the quality of the Lord Chancellor's scientific investigations or methodological pronouncements, he is clearly among the first to argue publicly for the institutionalization of the pursuit of technological innovation.Footnote ¹ Upon review, the tradition of political thought prior to Bacon exhibits a remarkable unanimity as to the imprudence of encouraging technological innovation and—as Aristotle's classic consideration of the proposal of Hippodamus (as well as the qualifications he notes elsewhere) makes clear—they did so not from ignorance, but with eyes open.Footnote ²

Having been led back to Bacon's writings, however, such a reader encounters a significant impasse: the relation between Bacon's most overtly political writings and his writings on behalf of a new technologically fruitful science is obscure. Thus, while Bacon makes clear that the problem with technological innovation concerns its political impact,Footnote ³ and thus the argument for its institutionalization must come with a novel understanding of politics (at least as regards its relation to the arts or technai), in his most emphatically political writings, for example, his essay “On the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” but throughout the Essays and in the chapters on politics from The Advancement and De Augmentis, Bacon says very little about science or technology, even about the potential benefits of a new technologically oriented science. And yet, in his scientific writings and various manifestos on behalf of a new science, no thinker of the era shows a comparable vision for the untapped transformative potential of a funded, honored, organized, methodical, experimental science. At times Bacon even seems to urge contradictory positions: for example, on the respective ranking of the public honors that should be accorded scientist-inventors, on the one hand, and great statesmen, on the other.Footnote ⁴

In recent years there have been some remarkable contributions to our understanding of the unity or coherence of Bacon's thought, including some plausible attempts to account for this central curiosity in particular, but I believe it fair to say that something of a gap remains, a gap that we have been reminded of by Markku Peltonen's statements on Bacon's political thought.Footnote ⁵ Unpersuaded by the recent scholarship, Peltonen asks that we face squarely Bacon's silence on science and technology in his political essays, and suggests that doing so raises the question of whether the effort to discern an underlying or overarching coherence in Bacon's corpus is not fundamentally misguided, whether it is not an imposition of values alien to Bacon's own thought. Instead he suggests that we consider Bacon's writings, and his political writings in particular, to be fundamentally rhetorical in the sense of being tailored to address particular topics and particular audiences, that we read Bacon as the consummate lawyer, unwedded to any principles in light of which his various acts of advocacy can be brought together to form a whole.

Now I believe there to be a number of possible responses to Peltonen's argument, starting from the fact that Bacon himself tells us, precisely in the context of articulating the task of the historian of philosophy, that “it is the harmony of a philosophy in itself which giveth it light and credence.”Footnote ⁶ Again, in the posthumously published dedicatory epistle to An Advertisement Touching a Holy War, Bacon gives a lengthy statement on how his various writings come together to form a whole. Coherence is simply not a “value” foreign to Bacon's thought. But to say this much leaves unfinished the task of interpreting Bacon's thought on this crucial question of the relation between technological innovation and politics. It is here that I believe the most direct and fruitful approach focusses on New Atlantis. For on its face New Atlantis would appear to be devoted to precisely this topic, featuring as it does the description of the island nation of Bensalem, where unparalleled stability, preternatural obedience to law, and institutionalized technological innovation appear perfectly reconciled, and culminating in the assignment to the European sailors of the task of bringing this good news back to Europe. In the end, a careful reading of New Atlantis points to a resolution of the impasse upon which Peltonen's case for the incoherence of Bacon's corpus rests, but in so doing, it opens up a more fundamental question about Bacon's project, and ultimately about the technological modernity that we know first hand.

II

Let me begin again, then, by borrowing a formulation I think particularly apt: it is not safe to discuss any topic of the New Atlantis before one has considered the literary character of the book. Now, of course, because the question of why Bacon imparted to the book its particular literary character is inextricable from the question of Bacon's ultimate intention in crafting it, it cannot be adequately answered until one has understood the work as a whole. The question of the form or genre of New Atlantis is thus the first and last question. What adds to the difficulty and importance of this question is Bacon's uncharacteristic silence in New Atlantis.Footnote ⁷ Since we are given no reason to suppose Bacon himself is the narrator or is represented by any other single character encountered in the book, the only words he speaks unambiguously in his own name are the title and subtitle, and his own name and title.Footnote ⁸ Leaving aside the title and subtitle for the moment, a glance at the work, together with Bacon's avowal of authorship, suffices to identify the work as fiction.Footnote ⁹ But what kind of fiction is New Atlantis? And can we glean anything of its author's intention by considering the kind of work it is?

As everyone knows, New Atlantis is a “utopia”: it belongs to the genre christened after the island described by a certain Hythloday in dialogue with Thomas More. Identifying the work in this way may be helpful inasmuch as it reminds us of one of the important works Bacon had in mind in crafting New Atlantis. More's Utopia is referred to on at least one occasion during the course of the Europeans' visit to Bensalem,Footnote ¹⁰ and the two books share certain broad structural parallels, most obviously in their describing marvelous islands discovered as the result of the breakthroughs of modern navigation. By Bacon's time, the name “Utopia” was already undergoing its transformation into a common noun denoting any imaginary or otherwise inaccessible polity, and was beginning to take on connotations of a place where improbable if not impossible wishes came true.Footnote ¹¹ Bacon himself uses the word in something approaching this sense in his essay “Of Usurie”: “Therefore, to speak of the Abolishing of Usury is Idle. All States have ever had it, in one Kinde or Rate, or other. So as that Opinion must be sent to Utopia.”Footnote ¹² And with this remark we are brought to the crux of the matter.

For what greatly complicates the question of the genre of New Atlantis is Bacon's apparent endorsement of Machiavelli's “realism,” or rather, his preference for the “effectual truth.” In The Advancement of Learning, in the context of his consideration of the received wisdom concerning civil knowledge pertaining to government, Bacon makes the following statement:

In a preceding chapter of The Advancement, Bacon had cited Machiavelli by name: “So that we are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.”Footnote ¹⁴ Together these passages attest to their author's familiarity and basic agreement with the “clarion call” that is the fifteenth chapter of Machiavelli's Prince:

How then, we are thus obliged to ask, can Bacon himself have authored a “frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth,” apparently detailing how men ought to live, and including a semi-independent model institution “more vast and high than can possibly be imitated in all things,”Footnote ¹⁶ given his conspicuous rejection of such endeavors as fruitless?

Of the few scholars who directly address this puzzle, most conclude that Bacon's Bensalem, unlike the imagined principalities and commonwealths of his predecessors, is meant to be practically realizable.Footnote ¹⁷ According to this view, it provides (however elliptically) a blueprint for implementation in a way that More's Utopia, Plato's Republic, and even Aristotle's Politics VII–VIII and Plato's Laws do not. There can be little doubt that the work invites, and was intended to invite, such a reading. As both Robert Faulkner and William Sessions have called to our attention, the most conspicuous moments in the drama or action of the work are the “conversion” of the European sailors and their being tasked as missionaries, even prophets, of a new faith.Footnote ¹⁸ Bacon surely intended that readers of New Atlantis would be, as indeed many were, moved to work for the “Bensalemization” of Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ To be altogether satisfied that such an interpretation exhausts Bacon's intention in crafting the work, however, one must overlook or explain away those features of Bensalem which, while integral to Bensalem, are simply impossible to reproduce, let alone in seventeenth-century Europe. Bensalem is characterized by near complete isolation from the rest of the world, it has enjoyed an uninterrupted three-thousand-year history, and it knew institutionalized and technologically oriented science before it knew Christianity.Footnote ²⁰New Atlantis can be read neither as a simple repetition of the classic “imagined principalities and commonwealths” or “utopias,” nor as the blueprint for reform or revolution that many of its readers have taken it to be. And so we are compelled to raise, as if from the beginning, the elementary question of just what kind of work New Atlantis is.

As the work is fiction, we turn to Bacon's explicit remarks on the characteristics and purposes of fiction in search of some further guidance. According to the articulation of human learning that Bacon offers in The Advancement, Footnote ²¹ while history has reference to man's memory, and philosophy to his reason, fiction, or poesy, has reference to man's imagination. The imagination, according to Bacon, is not bound by the laws of matter and so may separate and conjoin things in unnatural ways, performing “unlawful matches and divorces of things.” When not used merely as style, poesy “is nothing else but feigned history.” In so characterizing poesy, Bacon invites his reader to consider imaginary versions of each of the varieties of history he has just described.

According to Bacon the primary use or purpose of “feigned history” is to provide the mind “some shadow of satisfaction … in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it.”Footnote ²² Imagination offers man “a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety” than he could find in nature. Because “true history” falls short of magnitude and heroism, of justice, and of rarity or unexpectedness, “poesy serveth and confereth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation.” While reason “bows and buckles the mind,” forcing it to see things as they are, poesy “raises and erects the mind” and shows it what it longs to see. For this reason, Bacon pauses to note, poesy is especially well suited to rude times and barbarous regions otherwise deficient in learning. (Of course, these remarks come in the course of a rather lengthy catalog of the deficiencies of learning in Europe.)

Bacon supplements this threefold articulation of the purposes of feigned history with a formal or stylistic division of poesy into narrative, dramatic or representative, and allusive or parabolical varieties. Of these only the first and last seem pertinent to our present concern (representative poesy—drama and unnarrated dialogues—belonging, according to Bacon, on the stage). Narrative poesy is simply an imitation of history.Footnote ²³ To allusive or parabolical poesy, associated with “fables,” he accords a higher dignity and two separate or additional purposes: “infoldment” and “illustration.” As to the latter, Bacon advises that, “now and at all times,” because variety of true examples is wanting, parables remain an effective means of expressing to the vulgar points otherwise too sharp or subtle for their reason.Footnote ²⁴ Concurrently, or at least alternatively, parabolical poetry can perform an opposite use: “to retire and obscure … the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, or philosophy.”

Now, as mentioned, Bacon invites his reader to consider imaginative or poetic versions of each of the kinds of histories he had outlined in the previous three chapters (I. i. 2 – I. iii. 5) of The Advancement.Footnote ²⁵ Of particular interest in the present context, Bacon speaks of a variety of mixed history, then flourishing, which he calls the history of cosmography. Composed of many elements, from natural and civil history as well as mathematics, such histories describe unfamiliar regions, lands, and fruits, as well as habitations, governments, and manners. Bacon attributes to this genre the opening up and illumination of the world. As a result of modern voyages of discovery, man has succeeded in emulating the heavens themselves, circling the earth many times. These successes in seafaring and discovery encourage hope and expectation of future “proficience and augmentation of the sciences,”Footnote ²⁶ confirming the prophecy from Daniel (12:4), “Many shall pass through (or come and go) and knowledge shall be increased,” and conclusively indicate that the ancients' understanding of the world could be surpassed.

Putting these suggestions together, New Atlantis would seem to be a narrative (or heroical) feigned cosmographical history.Footnote ²⁷ It is the poetic presentation of the discovery of a new land, complete with descriptions of the strange fruits, the orderly buildings, the unfamiliar manners, and perhaps even the government one encounters there. As modern cosmography, the work will somehow open up or illuminate the world, suggesting that the ancients could be surpassed, and thus encouraging hope for the future advancement of the sciences. As poetic or imaginary, however, Bacon is not limited by “matter” or “the nature of things,” but is free to confer on his subjects a more surpassing greatness, a more perfect morality, and a more delightful variety than are actually possible. Crafting such a work serves at least two purposes. By thus “accommodating the shows of things to the desires of the mind,” and thereby offering hope, Bacon can “gain more sweet access” to “raise and erect the minds” even of the barbarous and vulgar. Moreover, if, as Rawley's introductory note to the reader suggests, the work is to be understood in some sense as a fable, and thus as parabolical, one might be led to suspect that certain mysteries of religion or policy not suitable for open presentation may also be infolded therein. In deed, perhaps these two purposes are but the convex and concave of a single arc.

III

So New Atlantis is first of all a travel story, a fictional cosmography. It is this travel story, the narration of an episode from a voyage to the Far East via the New World, that bears the title New Atlantis. The description of the “utopian” island of Bensalem is only the most prominent part of that story. To characterize New Atlantis as a utopia, then, is an error, for in so doing, one is led to downplay if not ignore the drama of the work as a whole and with it, the significance, historical and metaphoric, that Bacon attaches to the achievements of modern seafaring.Footnote ²⁸ We are reminded of this as soon as we consider Bacon's advice, conveyed by Rawley, that we mark the placement of New Atlantis after Sylva Sylvarum.Footnote ²⁹ The frontispiece to the volume including both works, like that which introduces The Great Instauration, is framed by a representation of the Pillars of Hercules. While the frontispiece to The Great Instauration features vessels coming and going between the pillars, and the quotation from the book of Daniel cited above, that to Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis features an enormous globe (traced by a map of the coasts delimiting the Atlantic Ocean), over which is written Mundus Intellectualis.Footnote ³⁰ From above the sun shines down over the globe, the pillars, and the open ocean, and two cherubim float aloft, looking down: the illumination of the intellectual world.

In others of his writings Bacon offers some further indications of the significance he attaches to seafaring and exploration. In the first instance, the discoveries of modern navigation are “signs” or propitious omens that the time is ripe for a “fresh start”: “And it is in our time, as you know, that the ocean has opened her bosom, new worlds have come to light, the limits of the old world have been thoroughly explored and studied.”Footnote ³¹ Bacon's language is at times astonishingly daring, reminding the contemporary reader of just how remarkable the feats of the great age of discovery were: “Nay, we have succeeded in imitating the heaven, whose property it is to encircle the earth; for this we have done by our voyages. … Distant voyages and travels have brought to light many things in nature, which may throw fresh light on human philosophy and science and correct by experience the opinions and conjectures of the ancients.”Footnote ³² The achievements of modern seafaring are presented as clear examples of an increase in human powers leading to an increase in human knowledge. Bacon seems to delight in juxtaposing the successes of modern seafaring to the parochialism and ignorance of the ancients, who knew little or nothing of the New World, and could claim only the most meager knowledge of the past.Footnote ³³

Bacon's remarks on the historic significance of these discoveries shade almost imperceptibly into his metaphoric or allegorical appropriation of them.

In the Advancement, while considering the first “disease of learning,” the “extreme affecting of … antiquity [or] novelty,” Bacon invokes the example of Columbus, who, like Alexander the Great, had to overcome the prejudice that what had yet to be done is impossible: such is “the levity and inconstancy of men's judgments, which till a matter be done, wonder that it can be done; and as soon as it is done, wonder again that it was no sooner done.” In “intellectual matters,” Bacon continues, this tendency “is much more common.”Footnote ³⁵ Then, at the outset of Book II, Bacon wonders aloud to the would-be financier of his would-be intellectual voyage of discovery, “For why should a few received authors stand up like Hercules' columns, beyond which there should be no sailing or discovering?”Footnote ³⁶ Similarly, in The Great Instauration, which as we have mentioned is introduced by a frontispiece metaphorically identifying the work with the voyages of discovery, Bacon likens his contribution to the use of the understanding and intellect to the discovery of the compass:

Presuming then that Bacon has deliberately chosen the genre of New Atlantis with such associations in mind—that the work is a fictional cosmography designed to illuminate or open up the intellectual globe, just as actual cosmographies have done the terrestrial globe—we may also be led to suspect that the location or setting of the tale is of significance. As we have seen, Bacon clearly associates the mediterranean with ancient learning, and, like Machiavelli before him,Footnote ³⁸ he metaphorically identifies his own project of discovery with the Columbian voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules, if not the discovery of the New World itself, urging the substitution of “our modern ‘plus ultra’ [for] the ‘non ultra’ of antiquity.”Footnote ³⁹

But Bensalem, the island nation disclosed in New Atlantis, is explicitly described as “beyond both the old world and the new”(43). Bensalem claims a longer continuous history than any European nation, and yet it has had mastery of navigation for thousands of years and is home to an institutionalized science of innovation. Bensalem is at once the most modern and the most ancient of nations. Accordingly, the Europeans arrive in Bensalem via the New World.

New Atlantis is a fictional cosmography, a travel story, recounting part of a voyage not merely beyond the Pillars of Hercules, but beyond even the New World. Having followed their plus ultra so far, however, these adventurous Europeans find themselves lost, beset by “calms and contrary winds” and at risk of perishing at sea. Their provisions exhausted, and with no other choice, they pray to God that he discover land to them. The “utopian” island of Bensalem appears as an answer to their prayers, and they are saved.Footnote ⁴⁰ Given Bacon's repeated identification of his new science with open-sea navigation, are we not invited to invest the location of Bensalem and circumstances of its discovery with similarly metaphoric significance? Could it be that, so far from a minor, incomplete, and popular work dashed off between experiments with frozen chickens and spirit of nitre, New Atlantis presents the discovery of that which will save European man from perishing at sea once he has left the safe, familiar confines of the intellectual Mediterranean?

IV

A word about the status of the text. According to the prefatory note, “To the Reader,” signed by William Rawley—Bacon's secretary, literary executor, and chaplain—New Atlantis is a fable designed first of all to present a model college for the investigation of nature. Rawley asserts that this primary task is complete, but that the model offered is in some respects higher and more vast than is imitable. He adds that in the work, Bacon also thought to “present a frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth,” but suggests that he was diverted from this “long work” by a desire to collect natural history, an activity he much preferred. Now, while it remains unclear what control, if any, Bacon had over its contents,Footnote ⁴¹ the note makes a number of provocative suggestions. The first and most conspicuous, though never quite explicitly made, is that the work is importantly incomplete, or unfinished. To be sure, the title New Atlantis is accompanied, in the place of a subtitle, by the apparently cautionary phrase, “A Work Unfinished.” But if one reads the text ignoring this phrase, Rawley's note, and the concluding “The rest was not perfected,” it would not be at all obvious that it is fragmentary or unfinished.Footnote ⁴² As a fiction, it has every mark of being complete as it stands.Footnote ⁴³ The narrative is straightforwardly chronological throughout: it begins by relating the circumstances leading to the arrival of the European travelers to the island of Bensalem, and concludes 28 or 29 days later relating the circumstances by which the narrator is given leave to publish what he has learned (or at least what he has learned from the Father of Salomon's House) “for the good of other nations.” As one commentator noted, “the continuation of the fragment that one might envisage would scarcely fill in the gaps in the account of Bensalem, which is in effect complete.”Footnote ⁴⁴ There is now a fairly well-established interpretive tradition skeptical of the incompleteness of the work, interpreting it as some kind of literary device.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this, commentators derive some support from Spedding's finding that, though unfinished, “the New Atlantis seems to have been written in 1624, and … to have been intended for publication as it stands. It was published accordingly by Dr. Rawley in 1627.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, there is evidence that Bacon oversaw the preparation of the Latin translation of the work.Footnote ⁴⁷ Regarding both versions, Bacon decided on posthumous publication. Precisely if we follow the suggestion of Rawley's note that the work was crafted by an author aware of his approaching death and eager to return to his scientific inquiries, we may suppose that he took care to complete as much as he thought necessary. To be sure, there are things we should like to know about Bensalem, but we have no choice but to keep open the possibility that Bacon had reasons for leaving them obscure. In what follows I will offer an alternative interpretation of the subtitle of the work, though I believe it is important to note from the outset that while the work is conspicuously declared unfinished, as a fiction it appears complete.

Secondly, the note effectively divides the work into two parts: the completed account of the College of the Six Days' Works or Salomon's House, which Rawley suggests is the primary purpose of “the fable” but which takes up only about the last third of the work as a whole, and the rest of the work. The note thus suggests that the model of Salomon's House is detachable from the rest of New Atlantis, and invites such a detachment.Footnote ⁴⁸ The note encourages considering the rest of New Atlantis, and in particular the political setting of the college, which it identifies as an attempt to “compose a frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth,” as incomplete or abortive, because posthumous. Now this is in itself of some interest, for, as others have noted in this connection, Bacon frequently declares his reluctance to speak on matters of government, and underscores the delicacy with which such matters should be treated.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the context of one very important declaration of this kind, we hear Bacon announce, “But if my leisure time shall hereafter produce anything concerning political knowledge, the work will perchance be either abortive or posthumous.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, while seeming to encourage the dismissal of the bulk of New Atlantis, Rawley's identification of the work as an unfinished, posthumous fable, when put together with what Bacon himself says about these literary characteristics, actually invites us to regard the work as a, if not the document of Bacon's political thought.Footnote ⁵¹

V

Such a lengthy discussion of the literary character of New Atlantis may seem irrelevant and unnecessary, given that the very title of the work is often read as an adequate indication of the kind of work it is. Bacon is composing a new Atlantis, to replace that offered by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. Surely, as some of its better readers have suggested, the work is unfinished in imitation of the Critias, which famously breaks off in mid-sentence.Footnote ⁵² For some, the title of the work seems almost as important as its content in supporting the conclusion that the work is a utopia or a modern utopia. Virtually without exception scholars have taken the title New Atlantis to refer to the island of Bensalem portrayed in the work.Footnote ⁵³ But if we begin with—and refuse to let go of—what is most apparent, these interpretations show themselves to have been rather “overhastily abstracted from the facts.”

Just as Aristotle never wrote an Organum, so Plato never composed a dialogue called Atlantis.Footnote ⁵⁴ Atlantis makes its first appearance in Plato's Timaeus. Responding to Socrates' expressed desire to observe in action, or in motion, a city in certain respects like that constructed in logos in the Republic, that is, to see it contending with other cities and at war (a “fitting” war, 20b), Critias offers to recount a tale of the deeds of the austere and virtuous old Athens, as passed down to him by his grandfather who heard it from his father, who heard it from Solon, who heard of it from Egyptian priests, who know the story from ancient hearsay. It is this old Athens, long since destroyed and refounded, which is said to bear certain resemblances to the city Socrates described in speech the day before. And the greatest of the deeds of this old Athens was its defeat of the mighty and grasping western empire called Atlantis.

Presented with a work entitled New Atlantis, a reader of Plato's Atlantan dialogues would be prepared to encounter a renovation of the defeated and destroyed empire of Atlantis: the great power, located beyond the Pillars of Hercules, that made a bid at total global conquest, and that was defeated only by the austere and virtuous old Athens, the city that of all actual cities most closely resembles that which Socrates constructed in logos “the day before.” In Plato's dialogues, Atlantis comes to sight as the anti-utopia, the archenemy of the city in speech.Footnote ⁵⁵ To entitle a work New Atlantis, then, is to proclaim the resuscitation of the rival to the city in speech (or at least its closest actual approximation) and thus to prepare for, if not declare, a new war on that city, or perhaps all such “imaginary commonwealths.”Footnote ⁵⁶ So far from identifying the work as a “eutopia,” the title New Atlantis could be said to be the Machiavellian, that is, anti-utopian, title par excellence.Footnote ⁵⁷ Perhaps it is unnecessary to underscore the point further, but we recall that the title is among the very few words Bacon speaks in his own name.

This having been said, the title remains a puzzle, for as soon as one has read the work, one cannot help but be struck by the un-Atlantan character of Bensalem.Footnote ⁵⁸ Furthermore, the two words of the title never appear together in the text, let alone as identifying Bensalem. In the course of the tale we learn that Bensalem is not Atlantis; that Atlantis was a once flourishing neighbor of Bensalem; that, as Plato (or Critias, or Solon, or the Egyptian priest) maintained, Atlantis was a mighty western power located beyond the Pillars of Hercules; and that it was defeated in a failed attempt at empire and was subsequently obliterated in a great cataclysm. We are offered no reason to conclude that Atlantis was older than Bensalem, or that it colonized Bensalem, or in any way served as a model for Bensalem. Why then has Bacon entitled the work New Atlantis? Or rather, how is the travel story we are presented, the core of which (but only the core of which) is the description of Bensalem, properly entitled, and so understood as, New Atlantis?

To begin to answer this question, let us consider what we learn about (the old) Atlantis in New Atlantis. Firstly, it is equated with what Europeans call America. According to the “faithful registers of those times” which are in the possession of the Bensalemites, three thousand years before the occurrence of the story (roughly 1388 BCFootnote ⁵⁹), Atlantis was a commercial power, with 1500 large ships, though its greatest flourishing came “an age after, or more” (53). At that time it was a “mighty and proud kingdom, in arms, shipping, and riches,” and it launched a campaign into Europe.Footnote ⁶⁰ From this expedition, no one returns. Were this not calamity enough, “Divine Revenge overtook not long after those proud enterprises. For within less than the space of one hundred years, the great Atlantis was utterly lost and destroyed … by a particular deluge or inundation” (54). The narration continues, describing how sparsely populated Atlantis is today, inhabited only by a primitive, ignorant, and “young” people. During the flood, we are told, the agricultural and civilized people of the valleys and lowlands all perished, and with them all Atlantan learning. Those that remained were the simple savages who always inhabit the mountains. These then descended to the valleys, and, unprepared for the warmth of the lowlands, are forced to go naked. They do delight in feathers, however, as this reminds them of the example of the birds, who during a flood seek the highlands, and whose example the ancestors of the savage people followed.Footnote ⁶¹ We are also told that because of this “main accident of time” (55), Bensalem loses contact with the Atlantans (though somehow they know that they are still a rude and savage people who like bird feathers and run naked) “with whom of all others, in regard they lay nearest to us, we had most commerce” (55).

Now, upon reflection, what is most striking about this entire account of Atlantis is that it seems an altogether unnecessary digression. It emerges gradually and unobtrusively from the more general account of Bensalem—offered by the Christian priest and governor of the Strangers' House in response to the question of how it is that Bensalem “was known to few, and yet knew most of the nations of the world” (50)—but adds nothing to the answer to that question. An adequate answer to the question the sailors ask would have had to include only the following details: in the past the world had greater commerce by sea than it does now; at that time Bensalem was known to the rest of the world, but since then once mighty empires have disappeared and been destroyed by various “accidents of time”; seafaring and commerce have declined everywhere (except in Bensalem); during that period of general decline a legislator gave Bensalem laws proscribing commerce with other nations and other laws aimed at keeping it informed of developments in other nations. The entire discussion of Atlantis, its rise and fall, and in particular its current state, is irrelevant to the question at hand.Footnote ⁶² If it warrants mention at all, it would be only to appeal to the authority of the Platonic writings regarding the existence of Atlantis, but to that end it would suffice simply to name it, and any other description would be superfluous.

On the modest assumption that Bacon has not included a lengthy discussion of Atlantis (one half of his already curious title) for no purpose save embellishment, we must probe further. For that purpose we necessarily have recourse to the Platonic account of Atlantis, being thus invited to do so by the text itself, or rather, by the priest-governor from whom we hear this apparently irrelevant discussion of the rise and fall of Atlantis. In the course of his account of old Atlantis, the governor of Strangers' House refers to “the narration and description which is made by a great man with you” (53). To be sure, the governor dismisses certain details of this narration as “poetical and fabulous,” though he confirms Plato's ascription of might and majesty to Atlantis, its military expedition, and its fate (though denying that earthquakes were involved in its destruction).Footnote ⁶³ Now, in the Timaeus, Critias offers a speech about ancient things that his grandfather heard from his father, who heard it from Solon, famed lawgiver of Athens and “wisest of the Seven” sages of antiquity (20d, 21c).Footnote ⁶⁴ According to Critias's grandfather, Solon could have been remembered not only as the wisest of sages, but as the greatest of poets had he only “finished off the account that he brought here from Egypt” and not “misused his poetry by treating it as a side-job” (21c). While in Egypt, Solon visited a district of great Athens-lovers. There he “put questions about old things to the priests” and “discovered that neither he himself nor any other Greek hardly knew anything at all … about such things” (22a). The Egyptian priests informed Solon that because of the “destructions of mankind” (22c) which have rendered them oblivious to the distant past, the “Greeks are always children, and there's no such thing as an old Greek” (22b, 20e). What accounts they do have are “told in such a way that it has the figure of a story (muthos)” (22d). As an example, the priest offers a physical explanation for an event the Greeks know only in mythical or divine terms (22d). According to the Egyptian priest, when “destruction comes about on earth by a great deal of fire at long stretches of time,” the people in the highlands and mountains perish, but when in turn “the gods purify the earth by flooding it with waters, then those who live in the mountains—herdsmen and shepherds—are saved” (22d). Either because of its peculiar geography or its piety, Egypt is spared from these destructions and is thus able to keep records of them as well as of all “beautiful or great” or otherwise distinctive events “either near you or here or even in another region” safely stored in their temples (23a). All other peoples are relatively new to letters and writing and “all the things that cities need” (23a). Following a period of restoration and rediscovery, “after the usual span of years, the heavenly stream comes back again like a plague to sweep your people away, and leaves only the illiterate and uneducated among you, so that all over again from the beginning, you become young, as it were, knowing nothing either of things here or of whatever was in your own land in olden times” (23a–b).Footnote ⁶⁵ The Egyptians mock Solon and the Greeks for remembering only one great flood and being ignorant that “before the time of the greatest destruction by water, what is now the city of the Athenians was the best in war and was outstanding in all respects for her excellent laws” (23c). Solon is advised to consider Egyptian laws in order to see “many examples of the things that were once there in your land” (24a). The most significant parallels are those concerning the conduct of war and the place of wisdom. Egyptian laws, we hear, are informed by careful attention to or study of the cosmos, which discovers “all that accrues to human things from those that are divine,” and a wisdom or prudence that is shown not least in its medicine (24c).

The greatest of the deeds of old Athens, Solon is told, is her defeat of a great power “which, in its insolence, was advancing against all of Europe together with Asia, having set out from somewhere far out in the Atlantic Ocean” (24e). “[O]n this very island of Atlantis there was gathered a great and wondrous power of kings” which held an extensive empire. The Athenians, however, repulsed their advance, but were themselves subsequently destroyed together with the Atlantans and Atlantis in “monstrous earthquakes and floods” (25d).

In the Critias, Plato's only unfinished, or apparently unfinished dialogue, we are offered a continuation of this account, one that features a much more extensive description of Atlantis. In that account the magnificence and splendor of Atlantis is contrasted with the rustic and moderate simplicity of old Athens. Atlantis itself is said to be of “great elevation” (118a) and characterized by magnificent opulence.

What, then, do we learn from Plato's account of Atlantis that can help us to make sense of Bacon's title? To begin with, we learn that Bensalem bears very little resemblance to Plato's Atlantis, either in terms of its geography, its architecture, its religion, or the general conduct of its affairs. Bensalem is described as “flat to our sight” and the buildings of the port city are “not great indeed, but well built” (38). And while Atlantis is aggressive and grasping, Bensalem keeps to itself and defends itself without shedding any blood (53). Here it is worth noting that on Critias's account, Atlantis and the Atlantic Ocean are both named for Atlas, the Atlanteans' first king. Bensalem (literally “son” or “offspring of peace”) is located in the Pacific (literally peaceful) Ocean. The most conspicuous point of similarity between Plato's account and Bacon's are the descriptions of the former glory, subsequent destruction, and present state of America or Atlantis. Less obvious, though of greater importance, are the broad structural parallels, and these, so far as I can tell, have never adequately been interpreted.Footnote ⁶⁶

New Atlantis, like Critias's tale, tells of a traveler receiving an account of ancient, otherwise long forgotten events and places. Both accounts are provided by priests, albeit priests who are surprisingly open to natural explanations of the cataclysmic events they describe. Science and religion seem to be strangely intermingled both in Bensalem and Egypt. In Bensalem the scientists dress and conduct themselves like priests (69–71), while the priests acknowledge natural limits on Divine Revenge (54) and defer to scientists in the judging of miracles (47–48). In Egypt the priests vascillate between crediting their unique felicity to piety and to geography (22d–e), and between natural and supernatural explanations for general destructions (22c–d, 23b). Both Bensalem and Egypt pride themselves on keeping records of the happenings and accomplishments of the other nations of the world (23a, 24a; New Atlantis, 58–59). From others of Bacon's writings we are reminded that Egypt, like Bensalem, accords honors to its inventors.Footnote ⁶⁷ Note that both the Bensalemite and the Egyptian priests distinguish their accounts from those muthoi or fables of the Greeks, and both travelers are ridiculed for remembering only one flood.Footnote ⁶⁸ Furthermore, in each tale one region or country alone avoids the general cataclysms that have befallen all other regions or countries. So far from being the “New Atlantis” of the title, Bacon's Bensalem is the equivalent to or stand-in for Plato's Egypt.

Once this structural analogy is recognized, the riddle of Bacon's title can be solved. New Atlantis, like Critias's tale, tells of the education of a legislator or would-be legislator, in the one nation that has escaped the ravages of time. Solon, famed legislator or re-legislator of Athens, goes to a land of Athens-lovers, which has been preserved from the many general destructions of mankind. In the course of his visit he becomes highly regarded by the learned men of this land, hears of the great deeds of old Athens, and is encouraged to look to certain Egyptian practices said to be akin to those of old Athens. The narrator of New Atlantis arrives in Bensalem, gradually replaces the “foremost man” of his company, and acquires privileged access to Bensalem's great men, from whom he learns of the great deeds of old Atlantis (“with whom of all others, in regard they lay nearest to us, we [Bensalemites] had most commerce” [55]Footnote ⁶⁹), as well as certain of the secrets of Bensalem's extraordinary longevity and felicity. As Egypt stands to old and new Athens, so Bensalem stands to old Atlantis and the “unfinished work” that is new Atlantis.Footnote ⁷⁰ We should recall in this connection that the narrator locates Bensalem “beyond both the old world and the new” (43), whereas Atlantis itself is a part of the New World. Should one doubt that Bacon may have had such an analogy in mind, consider the following:

Of course, as the context makes clear, Bacon is well aware that this is a matter of some practical importance inasmuch as “by referring my present proposals to those ancient times, [I could] invest them with a certain solemnity, as self-made men do, who attach to themselves the nobility of some ancient stock by means of genealogical hints and conjectures.”

VI

New Atlantis is a travel fiction recounting the discovery of a land “beyond both the old world and the new.” This discovery was also, indeed it was primarily, the salvation of the otherwise lost and doomed crew of the European ship. The tale concludes with these same European sailors being assigned a task, a work to be done: the disclosure and publication of Bensalem's existence and practices, including its college for the investigation of nature, “for the good of other nations.” It is this tale, as a whole, which bears the title New Atlantis. Interpreting the analogy suggested by this title leads to the conclusion that it is to be understood as announcing “a work unfinished,” a project consequent to the lifesaving discovery of Bensalem.Footnote ⁷² So much is clear.

On the basis of this interpretation of the literary character and title of the work, we can begin to see our way to the resolution of the impasse that has vexed those seeking a unity or coherence to Bacon's oeuvre. Such a resolution would in no way deny Peltonen's observation that Bacon uses different rhetoric, even makes different arguments, in accordance with his intended audience. To take the crucial example referred to above, in Novum Organum Bacon urges the view that great scientists and inventors, as benefactors of the whole species, deserve the highest, divine honors; whereas in his depiction of the happily flourishing Bensalem, the only individual revered as divine or quasi-divine is Solamona, the great founder or re-founder, whose foremost concern was securing the happiness of Bensalem. When speaking to prospective scientist-inventors, Bacon offers them the highest honors; when describing a well-ordered political community, the political retains its preeminence. As this example indicates, however, such apparent contradictions admit of resolution. Once we recognize the gap between the project or “unfinished work” announced by the title and the description of the “utopian” island of Bensalem, we are led to interpret the action of the story as a marriage between the lusty European nation-state (familar to readers of the Essays, and Bacon's more overtly political writings) and the chastest nation, “the virgin of the world,” Bensalem, with the title indicating the nature or inclination of the child of that union.Footnote ⁷³ Bacon's vision comes to sight as the technological empowerment of the nation-state, perhaps even the global conquest of the technologically empowered nation-state.Footnote ⁷⁴

Now I readily concede that this reading of the literary character and title of New Atlantis, while indicating certain broad conclusions about the intention of the work, has not yet disclosed the reasons or grounds justifying such a project.Footnote ⁷⁵ On the assumption that such reasoning can be found within the work, it must be sought in a consideration of the descriptive content and the action of the tale to whose formal outlines we have confined our attention here. Rather than attempt a necessarily partial beginning to such a rereading, I will instead conclude with some final observations about the implications of the gap that has emerged between the description of the happy island of Bensalem and the project announced by the title, and thus about the literary character Bacon imparted to the work.

Bensalem, which we can perhaps call the Baconian utopia, affords Bacon the occasion to directly engage the classical utopian tradition of political philosophy. So, for instance, Bensalem makes clear that Bacon must believe that the ancients were wrong about the dangers posed by technological innovation to the good regime. Whereas Aristotle's critique of Hippodamus's proposal to reward the discoverer of something useful for the city indicates that technical innovation always tends to legal innovation and ultimately regime change, and whereas the Athenian Stranger recommends a divinely sanctioned prohibition of innovation even when it comes to children's toys and games,Footnote ⁷⁶ Bensalem presents the possiblity of a political community enjoying the benefits of technical and scientific innovation without thereby compromising the authority of its laws. But this said, Bacon is by no means naïve about the challenge posed to law and politics by innovation. Perhaps it would be better to say that only Bensalem—that is, only a closed society existing altogether on its own somewhere, unknown to the outside world, where scientific and technological innovation are pursued secretly and under strict regulations, where religious and scientific authority are thoroughly intermingled, and where even “the state” is kept in the dark about certain discoveries—can effectively preserve itself, that is, preserve the authority of its laws and customs, while pursuing scientific and technological innovation.Footnote ⁷⁷

Still, we have seen that Bacon's project involves the equipping of European man and thus the European state with a technologically oriented science, despite the absence of those prerequisites. Hence whatever more precisely Bacon's political intention, it is not the Bensalemization of Europe. This observation leaves us with the question of what contribution the description of the “utopian” island of Bensalem makes to this “Work unfinished.” In other words, why does Bacon advance his anti-utopian and imperial project indirectly, through a tale about the discovery of an imaginary regime on an island named “Son of Peace”? This curiosity becomes the more conspicuous once we recognize that the preponderance of the description of Bensalem is the result of a decision taken by the narrator, and that it is contrary to the wish and command of the Father of Salomon's House who gives the sailors leave to return to Europe. He charges the Europeans, and the narrator in particular, with the publication of the account he has made: the account of the scientific research institute, and no more (83). The account we are provided of the arrival and reception of the Europeans in Bensalem, the history of Bensalem, the erotic nomoi of Bensalem, is something else.Footnote ⁷⁸ What accounts for the narrator's decision?

Now the action of the tale of the European discovery of Bensalem has as its first peak the conversion or winning over of the entirety, or almost the entirety, of the European crew to an attachment to Bensalem.Footnote ⁷⁹ They are said to have forgotten all that was dear to them in Europe (60). The first half of the drama of New Atlantis concludes with the European sailors finding their true home. We are thus brought to see the tremendous, nearly universal appeal of a political community that is able to plentifully provide the needs and wants of the body. The second half concludes with the sailors being sent back to Europe tasked with the publication of the secrets of Salomon's House. Bacon has crafted the work so as to encourage an effort at realizing for Europe a Bensalem-like felicity through the institutionalization of a methodical, organized, experimental, and technologically oriented science. But in the course of the first half of the tale, we learn that a necessary condition of Bensalem's happiness is its isolation. Solamona's legislation for Bensalem sought to preserve “the happy and flourishing estate” he found already established in Bensalem, and to that end he capitalized on the general decline in navigation and commerce and closed the island off all but completely to the outside world (56), and established its college for the investigation of nature (58–59). The discovery of Bensalem to the rest of the world, the action of the New Atlantis, is thus the undoing of one of the necessary conditions of Bensalem's happiness—which happiness was, at least in part, what led to the “conversion” of the Europeans.Footnote ⁸⁰ We have no choice but to conclude that Bacon is deliberately encouraging a hope he knows to be misplaced. The closed, self-sufficient political community, concerned primarily with internal political health and stability and the happiness of the people, is no longer within the realm of the possible.Footnote ⁸¹ To the extent that the classical utopian tradition is crucially dependent on this possiblity, it is here declared outmoded.Footnote ⁸² In this new world of global navigation, of commerce and competition between nations, of Christian humanism, there is no place to hide, and success will require expansion, colonies, empire, a concern with national greatness, and those qualities requisite to national greatness, a concern that is unknown in Bensalem.Footnote ⁸³ In aiming for it, and being guided by it, European man will be actually working toward the realization of something other than Bensalem, namely, a New Atlantis.

The literary character of Bacon's New Atlantis—a “utopia” within a “travel story”—thus serves at least two purposes. It allows Bacon directly to engage and critique particular elements of the classical utopian tradition, even as he rejects that tradition more radically. And by thus muting his rejection of the utopian tradition, preserving and so appearing to be working within it, Bacon is able to exploit the appeal of utopia, and so enlist it into the service of his own Machiavellian, or anti-utopian, project. The naked pursuit of power after power that ceaseth only in death, the never-ending flight from unease, even the endless quest to enlarge the bounds of human empire—these lack both the motivating appeal and the orienting guidance that the vision of Bensalem provides with its promise of peace, happiness, and rest.