Francis Bacon · Science
What a society looks like when it takes the pursuit of knowledge seriously.
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.
The story was never finished. Francis Bacon died in 1626 and left it that way, and 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.
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?
A researcher in Bensalem is received like a prince. A Father of Salomon’s House rides in procession while the people line the streets. The state funds the college, protects it, and honours its members above all others.
The institution has two names. One is Salomon’s House, after the biblical king famed for his wisdom. The other is 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.
Not everyone would put a college at the centre. A century earlier Thomas More had fixed his ideal island by justice, abolishing private property so that goods are held in common. If human misery is rooted in injustice, then Bensalem’s whole engine is aimed at the wrong target. Bacon stakes everything on knowledge instead.
The Father who finally explains the college to the visiting sailors offers it as a gift. His very first words are about purpose, because for Bacon everything begins with knowing what knowledge is for.
The college runs orchards where fruit is made to grow larger and ripen out of season. It has deep caves and high towers for experiments, artificial wells and lakes, and chambers that imitate weather. There are engine-houses, and ‘perspective-houses’ for studying light. It is a fantasy of applied science, written before applied science existed.
That is what the production line is for. Notice what the 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. A laboratory that size needs a staff, and no one on the staff does the whole job. Bacon drew up the chart down to the job titles.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You studied Bensalem’s college. Say what purpose its founding statement gives it, how its fellows divide the work, and what that division does to knowledge over time.
Leads to Thomas More.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.