Francis Bacon · Science
In his unfinished fable New Atlantis, Bacon imagines Salomon’s House, a state-funded college of organised researchers, and so sketches the blueprint for the modern research institution.
When Francis Bacon died in 1626, he left behind an unfinished story. His chaplain published it the next year, in 1627, bound together with a volume of natural history. It was called New Atlantis, and it is a strange, beautiful fragment: part travel tale, part sermon, part prophecy.
The story is simple. A European ship, lost in the Pacific, drifts to an unknown island called Bensalem. The sailors are taken in, fed, and slowly shown the wonders of the place. Bensalem is a Christian commonwealth, prosperous and gentle, but its true marvel is not its piety or its wealth. It is an institution at the heart of the society, a college unlike anything in the Europe the sailors come from.
Bacon had spent his life arguing that knowledge should be rebuilt from the ground up. Here, in his last work, he stopped arguing and started imagining. What would a society actually look like if it took the pursuit of knowledge seriously?
The institution has two names. It is called Salomon’s House, after the biblical king famed for his wisdom, and it is also called the College of the Six Days’ Works, a reference to the six days of Creation. The idea is that by studying nature, the researchers retrace and understand the work God did in making the world.
This is the centre of Bensalem. A Father of Salomon’s House is received like a prince, riding in procession while the people line the streets. The state funds the college, protects it, and honours its members above all others. When one of the Fathers finally explains the institution to the visiting sailors, he does so as a gift, revealing its purpose, its work, and its people.
And his very first words are about purpose, because for Bacon everything begins with knowing what knowledge is for.
Notice what that founding statement does not say. It does not say the end of knowledge is contemplation, or wisdom for its own sake, or the glory of the knower. It says the end is the knowledge of causes and the effecting of all things possible. Knowledge is yoked to power and use.
This is Bacon’s lifelong theme, captured in a phrase he used elsewhere: science should work for the relief of man’s estate, the improvement of the human condition. Salomon’s House is not a monastery of thinkers. It is closer to a vast research and development laboratory, aimed at lengthening life, curing disease, improving crops, and multiplying useful inventions.
Bacon lists the wonders: deep caves and high towers for experiments, artificial wells and lakes, chambers that imitate weather, orchards where fruit is made to grow larger and ripen out of season, engine-houses, and ‘perspective-houses’ for studying light. It is a fantasy of applied science, written before applied science existed.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
New Atlantis (1627) describes Bensalem and its research college, Salomon’s House, which gathers knowledge through a division of labour for the relief of man’s estate.
Leads to bacon-legacy.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.