SOURCE: “Remarkable Ingratitude: Bacon, Prometheus, Democritus,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 32, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 79-90.

[In the following essay, Barbour explores the influence of Democritus on Francis Bacon's essay on Prometheus.]

Despite Robert Kargon's argument that Bacon abandoned atomism, the seventeenth-century reformer never got Epicureanism off his mind.¹ More carefully than any of his contemporaries, Bacon explored the relations between the atomism, hedonism, and theology of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, which appear in a wide arrange of contexts and with an array of values in Bacon's works. At times Bacon praises the sect for their close observations of nature, or for their refusal of Aristotle; but he also scolds them for their anthropomorphisms or for their dogmatism. They succeed, Bacon believes, in looking beyond the formal bogeys of Plato and Aristotle into the particles and motions of nature, but err in idolizing the private blessings of their masters. Unlike his contemporaries, Bacon was capable of culling out the various strands of the philosophy; and though he sometimes confused the three major atomists, the reformer of science privileged Democritus as the father unspoiled by the prodigal errors of his Epicureanized sons.² But no matter what his preferences, the Greek philosophy of atomism and pleasure forced Bacon to clarify the place of his own science in a cosmos designed and controlled by divine providence. In its complex lineage and notorious heritage, Epicureanism represented to Bacon a provocative model of everything that was at once productive and dangerous about his own program of reform.

In several key texts, Bacon attempts to articulate the superior insights of Epicureanism, even as he distances his new learning from the Greek philosophy and its transgressions against God, order, and virtue. Several of the essays included among the interpretations of myth in De Sapientia Veterum have been read in the context of Greek atomism. I want to add another myth to this list already featuring Cupid and Coelum. Bacon's essay on Prometheus epitomizes his long and hard struggle with the Epicureans in the advancement of learning. In Bacon's reading of the myth, Democritus is at first applauded for opposing a Prometheus who stands against pleasure but for providence. Now Bacon knows that Democritus precedes the Epicureans per se. But given the infamous legacy of the sons of Democritus, the mythographer at last gives science back to Prometheus in an about face. Science appears to reside, then, somewhere between the myth and the philosophy, yet on no halcyon middle ground: for Prometheus and Democritus, the demigod and the atomist, can trade places in the most disconcerting fashion.

I

The trouble with Prometheus begins when Bacon glosses the thief of fire as “providence.” According to Charles W. Lemmi, there was nothing new about this. Prometheus was often considered to represent “human forethought” and therefore “an enlightened leader and reformer who, so to speak, invented civilization.”³ Whatever the traditions behind Bacon's reading of the myth, this prudent and inventive Prometheus serves the new advancement of learning for clear and specific reasons:

Prometheus doth cleerely and elegantly signifie Prouidence: For in the vniuersality of nature, the fabricque and constitution of Man onely was by the Ancients pict out and chosen, and attributed vnto Prouidence, as a peculiar worke. The reason of it seemes to bee, not onely in that the nature of man is capable of a minde and vnderstanding, which is the seate of Prouidence, and therefore it would seeme strange and incredible that the reason and minde should so proceed and flowe from dumbe and deafe principles, as that it should necessarily be concluded, the soule of man to be indued with prouidence, not without the example, intention, and stampe of a greater prouidence.

(124-25)

There are two providences with which Prometheus is allied: the one heavenly, the other human. Bacon insists here that the two are really one: human foresight is the seat of God's providence, which has designed and implanted that faculty in the human soul “as a peculiar worke.” Never mind that Prometheus makes a career out of vexing Jupiter, who himself wants nothing more than to see the demigod punished. Prometheus represents for Bacon the perfect correspondence between a beneficent heaven and the world that it creates from “example, intention, and stampe.” More than this, Prometheus proves that human beings center the universe and prevent it from lapsing into mere fortuity where “all things would seeme to stray and wander without purpose” (125). Everything in the cosmos serves humankind, for this is the great creator's plan.

There are obvious reasons why the harmony between heaven and humanity supports the advancement of learning. If the sciences demand of their human agents a clarity of vision with which to revise the past and to investigate nature anew, it certainly helps to know that God is behind the whole enterprise. One can imagine some problems: human providence may find itself disagreeing with the divine, or divine providence may find its human counterpart presuming just a little too much in the correspondence. Indeed, Bacon often worries about such conflicts and idols. In the essay on Prometheus, however, the correspondence between one providence and another begins to fail when Bacon glosses the mythical theft of fire and its aftermath. With his first transgression, Prometheus violates his providential stature on both counts: he challenges the prerogatives of a Jupiter whose vigilance is both more and less awake to the trickery; but he also fails to foresee the consequences of his own act, which according to Bacon are very strange indeed.

Legend has it that the human beneficiaries of Prometheus's crimes proved ungrateful, complaining to Jupiter who gave them perpetual youth for their efforts. That this gift was soon and carelessly squandered might lead a reader to think that humankind was punished for its lack of foresight, that is, its opposition to Prometheus. But Bacon turns the tables in the most astonishing fashion. Opposition to Prometheus was, Bacon claims, a first step in the advancement of learning:

Seemes it not strange, that ingratitude towards the authour of a benefit … should find such approbation and reward? No, it seemes to be otherwise: for the meaning of the Allegory is this, That mens outcries vpon the defects of nature and Arte, proceed from an excellent disposition of the minde, and turne to their good, whereas the silencing of them is hatefull to the Gods, and redounds not so much to their profit.

(129)

In this analysis, Prometheus stands for the tyranny of tradition over science, for the slavery of the human mind to authorities (like Aristotle) or to unexamined paradigms of nature. If Prometheus has occluded the progress of exploration and discovery, then it follows that providence itself is culpable. But Bacon has given us two kinds of providence. “Foresight” might deserve some blame if its premature assumptions block the ongoing experience of natural phenomena. That is, foresight might depend on the belief that there will be no surprises in nature or throughout history. But God's providence, or rather human reconstructions of its divine schemes, can obstruct the advancement of learning too. Nature goes wanting as men and women look to the heavens for all their answers. Once supportive of the sciences but now stagnant, both heavenly and human providences lock the new learning in a stranglehold that some alternative hero must break. That hero proves to be Democritus.

II

The argument that human submission to divine providence impedes the reform of life on earth was, as Bacon knew well, Epicurean. As if on cue, Democritus enters the essay on Prometheus, opposing the stasis that the mythic hero represents. Throughout his works, Bacon admires Democritus more than the successive atomists who added hedonism, heightened fortuity, and emphasized the theological superstructure of Epicurus's intermundane gods. Sometimes this admiration goes so far as to argue that Democritus affirms providence.⁴ In “Of Atheism,” he is but one of the atomists who proves the providence of God no matter what tradition holds. In Bacon's reading of the myth of Coelum, however, Democritus is singled out for his proximity to scripture: “This Fable seemes enigmatically to shew from whence all things tooke their beginning, not much differing from that opinion of philosophers, which Democritus afterwards laboured to mainteine, attributing eternity to the first Matter and not to the world. In which he comes somwhat neere the truth of diuine writ, telling vs of a huge deformed Masse, before the beginning of the six daies worke” (62). In the same essay, Bacon cites Lucretius's hope that the gubernans fortuna will see fit to defer the collapse of the world; Bacon's translator, Gorges, renders the Latin phrase as “guiding prouidence” (64-65).

Bacon seems intent, then, on aligning Democritus with providence of both kinds; the Greek was among the first to approach nature with a care like that which Bacon wants for his moderns, and his atomism proves God's designs on the world, no matter what the intentions of the atomist himself. But Bacon knew well that Democritus's atomism stood emphatically against providence. For Bacon, as for many seventeenth-century authors, the “dumbe and deafe principles” opposing providence were, more often than not, the atoms that Democritus and Epicurus imagined as the basis of all things.⁵ In his reading of Cupid, as in other texts, Bacon leaves no trace of a doubt that he associated Epicurus with Democritus as two theorists of the atom, and that he exerted great effort in rethinking the atom whose qualities he likens to Cupid's blindness, nakedness, archery, and age. Both Cupid and the atom are beyond the scope of the senses—hence Democritus's contention that truth lies hidden in a dark well. The atom is, moreover, the “principium” that both rivals providence as the first cause, and erases providence altogether. Only a providential God could build “order and beautie” out of atoms, but those same atoms, the “principall law of Nature,” are “things emptie and destitute of prouidence, and as it were blinde” (82). Atoms may be pure and indivisible—they may indeed prove that God exists—but the legacy of atomism unsettles any complacent belief in the harmony of the two providences.

For Bacon, Democritus questions more than just Promethean providence; the atomist also challenges the hegemony of Aristotle for which Prometheus stands. But Democritus is not really an extremist whose place it is to gravitate as far away from fixity as possible. Rather, Bacon credits the father of atomism with a productive reconciliation between exploratory skepticism and a conclusive dogmatism: the Greek philosopher “with great moderation complained how that all things were inuolued in a mist … that wee know nothing, that wee discerned nothing, that trueth was drowned in the depthes of obscuritie, and that false things were wonderfully ioynd and intermixt with true” (130-31). As Montaigne knew, Epicureans can be read as committed dogmatists or inquisitive skeptics: their belief in the atoms and void aspires to certainty, yet their challenge to formal metaphysics and traditional ethics encourages a distrust of received ideas.⁶ In his essay on Prometheus, however, Bacon sees Democritus as a moderate skeptic, poised between the extreme skepticism of the New Academy and the blind confidence of the Peripatetics. Indeed, not long after his praise for the atomist, the mythographer applauds the marriage of the “Dogmaticall and Empiricall,” which entails a methodized experience of nature, “the conduct of experience, as by a certaine rule and method” (133).

Midway through the reading of Prometheus, then, Democritus emerges as a harbinger of induction, opposing a providence that can paralyze the advancement of learning. But in other works by Bacon, Democritus proves Promethean in two ways, affirming God's providence but also casting the shadow of authority over Epicurus and his followers. Conversely, Prometheus can turn Democritean in his reformation of the human sciences. In De Augmentis Scientiarum, for instance, Prometheus's discovery of fire is celebrated for its fortuity—for its elevation of experience and chance over logic.⁷ At the end of Bacon's reading of Promethean myth, moreover, the games held in honor of the mythic hero are said to represent human cooperation in the promotion of science. In the heritage of these games, Prometheus stands as the first demigod to challenge the few idolized authorities preventing the reformation of the organon.

Even if the Promethean games fail to promote the idealized providence with which Bacon begins, his Prometheus returns nonetheless to supplant the Democritus who has figured so centrally in the explanation of human ingratitude. Yet Bacon goes even further in undercutting the legacy of Democritus. Between Bacon's reading of human ingratitude and his interpretation of the Promethean games lies Pandora, whom Bacon, like Comes, aligns with pleasure.⁸ No matter that Democritus is not directly responsible for the hedonism of Epicurus: even so, Pandora introduces the most controversial and potentially embarrassing creed of Democritus's followers. Although Bacon separates the philosophical aspects of the myth from its religious and moral facets, he was too careful a student of Epicureanism not to know that atomism and hedonism are linked in that philosophy.⁹ Joining the atom and desire, his Cupid is but one instance of the growing Renaissance awareness that the Epicureans were at once atomists and hedonists. Pandora, who falls under the moral rubric of the gloss, threatens with pleasure the Prometheus whose allegiance to the fatalism and pleasure-hating of the Stoics is written large toward the end of the essay.

As a stand-in for Epicurus, whose name he partly bears, Epimetheus betrays providence at the moment when he embraces pleasure: in their love of “voluptuousnes,” “they that are of Epimetheus his sect, are improuident, not foreseeing what may come to passe hereafter, esteeming that best which seemes most sweete for the present” (137). Despite Bacon's remark in another text that the Epicureans were always good citizens, this combination of anti-providentialism and hedonism is said to wreak havoc on kingdoms and commonwealths.¹⁰ Prometheus's games, we have seen, reclaim him for the cause of new learning. But no matter what Prometheus's failures in the advancement of learning, his foresight is partly redeemed by the imprudence of his brother in the moral section of the mythography.

But not wholly. The “schollers” who follow Prometheus “are men endued with prudence,” but they err insofar as “they depriue themselues, and defraud their Genius of many lawfull pleasures, and diuers recreations” (138). From Erasmus and Valla to Robert Burton, Renaissance writers attempt to dispel misguided notions of Epicurean hedonism, and to show that by “pleasure,” Epicurus meant a tranquillity of mind and soundness of body enabled by a life of virtue.¹¹ In the early decades of the seventeenth century, English authors have a vested interest in the debate over hedonism insofar as the court and its church take such an emphatic position in approving the festive or sacred uses of pleasure. When Bacon tells us that the eagle gnawing at Prometheus's liver is the very emblem of “fresh anxieties and feares,” his defense of innocent pleasure is even more clearly Epicurean. Just such anxieties could be cleared by the “lawful pleasures” advanced from Epicurus to the Book of Sport. Although Bacon does not acknowledge it, his citation of Virgil's well-known lines describes the Lucretian Epicurus as well as anyone: “Happie is hee that knowes the cause of things, / And that with dauntlesse courage treads vpon / All feare and Fates” (140). With a knowledge “de rerum natura,” Epicurus tempers fatalism and its discontents just as surely as he challenges the authority of Aristotle and Plato.

For Bacon, then, Prometheus represents the failure of a culture not just to advance the new science, but also to mitigate the anxiety of fatalism with pleasure. These failures can spell trouble for the commonwealth. In his essay on sedition, Bacon remarks that Epimetheus is perhaps better equipped than his brother to handle discontent in the state because the improvident brother gives vent to calamity yet keeps hope alive for the people.¹² It is, after all, Prometheus, not his brother, who suffers for his transgressions. And it is the thief of fire whose booty leads a commonwealth into voluptuous laxity in the first place:

And it is a common, but apt, interpretation, by Pandora to be meant pleasure & voluptuousnes, which (when the ciuill life is pampered with too much Arte, and culture, and superfluitie) is ingendred, as it were, by the efficacy of fire, and therefore the worke of voluptuousnes is attributed vnto Vulcan, who also himselfe doth represent fire.

(136)

Given the dangers of pleasure, Bacon makes the case that the “commodities of prouidence” depend on Stoicism and Christianity: in rescuing Prometheus, Hercules embodies both the fortitude of Seneca and the incarnation of Christ. But the value of these commodities is unstable in the advancement of learning against providence; pleasures—both “pampered” and “lawfull”—only add to the instability of the myth.

At the end of his reading of Prometheus, Bacon places his own allegory—and his own program—in a Promethean position. The author admits his likeness to Prometheus when he stops short of a full-scale interpretation of the myth's religious import, remarking that he has “interdicted [his] penne all liberty in this kinde, lest [he] should vse strange fire at the altar of the Lord” (144). Prometheus, we recall, not only stole fire but offered a mocksacrifice to Jupiter. Bacon's offering of religious allegory seems to return fire as a mock-offering, to repeat the kind of “strange” ingratitude that humanity showed their providential maker. But the erasure of the religious import of the myth imitates the Epicureans in removing providence altogether, leaving Bacon to search the recesses of nature for atoms, not for the handwriting of God.

If the Epicureans encourage the isolation of the gods from human science, Prometheus tries to collapse the two in his attempted rape of Minerva. Bacon mentions the transgression as an afterthought, but his reading of the episode is crucial for science:

which is nothing els but to shewe, that when we are puft vp with much learning and science, they goe about oftentimes, to make euen diuine Oracles subject to sense and reason, whence most certainly followes a continual distraction, & restlesse griping of the mind.

(141)

As innocent pleasures pacify the soul and heal the body, so the humble division of oracles and sense cures the “restlesse griping of the mind.” There are problems with this advice too. A dichotomy between nature and grace can segregate the human sciences so that they become utterly profane—this Charles notes in his copy of Bacon's Advancement.¹³ At the very least, the barrier between human providence and divine might serve as a cover for the Epicurean tendency to elevate a few privileged mortals to the level of the gods. Indeed more than once Bacon comments on “the opinion of Epicurus … who supposed the gods to be of human shape” (Advancement, 119). But no matter what the hidden dangers of separating divinity and science, Prometheus's rape is openly blasphemous or at best inhibitive, figuring the “continual distraction” of the scientist by theology. As Bacon's reading of the myth proceeds, the ideal conjunction of human and divine providences is replaced either by extreme divisions or by impious conflations of the two.

III

Between divinity and fortuity, Bacon's program for the advancement of learning models itself on two rivals, Prometheus and Democritus. But the two keep changing places. Prometheus is at once rebel and authority; Democritus, at once skeptic and dogmatist. Both have their theological perils. Democritus denies (but also proves) providence, while Prometheus, always irksome to Jupiter, represents providence in its two senses. One fathers a sect of hedonists, while the other is punished for his flagrant disregard for Jupiter's feelings. Neither the hero nor the philosopher is quite right for the advancement of learning. In his preface to The Wisdom of the Ancients, Bacon proposes that myth hides philosophy—as nature hides both atoms and providence—from the vulgar eye. Yet the dynamic between myth and philosophy is much more vexed than hide-and-seek. Bacon's science must navigate an ever changing field of discourse; it must seek a productive and secure position between a centered vision (that may prove myopic) and a radical materialism (that may turn blind). One critic, John C. Briggs, has shown the considerable effort that Bacon devoted to articulating the religious analogues of his great instauration. In the manner of the essay on Prometheus, these negotiations between the sacred and profane are altogether paradoxical.¹⁴

For all his advancement of science and humanity, Prometheus represents for Bacon the fixed and traditional, the divine and mortal providence that anticipates what it already knows, that locates humanity in the center of a cosmos whose structure is deduced from the assumption of providence. Prometheus transgresses on the side of stasis, of what humankind has always imagined itself to be. But Democritus and Epicurus herald a reform whose dangers include an anti-providential materialism and troublesome hedonism, and whose discoveries can topple over into a dispersive skepticism or, more likely, a new dogmatism. Locked in an embrace between the myth and the philosophy, Baconian science labors for its own space, method, and agenda. Perhaps, with all the perils of discovering fire or envisioning atoms, the ancients were wise to hide the dangers of science in a myth. Or maybe the delays in the advancement of learning have been fortuitous: time, Bacon declares, submerged the truths of the atomist. Whatever the impediments of the past, the myths of De Sapientia Veterum are among Bacon's most provocative recognitions that the deepest commitments of seventeenth-century culture, including its investments in providence, might prove some strange ingratitude to God, “equalizing, in a manner, their owne defects with Gods perfection” (129). Without warning, Prometheus might change into Democritus, and vice versa.

With his program of reform, then, Bacon presents strange fire to the gods controlling his world. Like Prometheus, he offers two bulls, one by which science promises to obey the gods, the other by which science mocks their providential designs. As one critic has said, Bacon's Prometheus and Epimetheus are more than brothers; they are almost interchangeable.¹⁵ With Epicurus in the role of the improvident brother, Bacon's essay on the “state of man” makes gestures toward the wider Stuart contexts of science and its dilemmas. It is true that Bacon wavers in the value that he assigns the atomists; their account of physical causes may prove excellent—“more real and better enquired than that of Aristotle and Plato” (Advancement, 96)—or “ignorant”—“a meere toy” (De Sapientia Veterum, 81). But it is equally true that Bacon promotes the same ambivalence about another Stuart discourse—one also caught between mechanism and the gods. This discourse is the masque, which epitomizes the Stuart uncertainty about how to justify a godlike power when so many rival factions are vying for the authority of God's providence. It would not have surprised Bacon, had he lived to see it, that the masquers of the 1630s were asked to envision their monarchs and nobles as so many refined atoms. Nor would it have surprised him that the masque-makers spent more and more time on the machines by which these atomic gods could make their grand entrances. That the metaphoric power of the atom would make its way into defenses of political authority is an event that Bacon recommends.¹⁶

In his reading of the Promethean myth, Bacon may “interdict” his pen from crossing the line dividing science from the rest of culture; but myth, Bacon knows, does not respect these lines, converting one signification into another without gratitude for the intentions of the mythmaker. “Neither am I ignorant how fickle and inconstant a thing fiction is,” he writes in the preface to De Sapientia Veterum, by way of apology for his usurpation of the very myths that might defy Bacon's own designs on nature. Like fortuitous atoms, so myth: the interpreter hopes for an internal fixity—of particle, of meaning—that might get lost in transmission. But myth is not alone in its slippages: philosophy, too, especially that spawned by Bacon's favorite, Democritus, is virtually fictive in eluding the grasp of its glossator.

Notes

1. Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 43-53. For Bacon's “consistent … interest” in atomism, see Graham Rees, “Atomism and ‘Subtlety’ in Francis Bacon's Philosophy,” Annals of Science 37, 5 (September 1980): 549-71; and Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), p. 114. I cite the De Sapientia Veterum from its 1619 translation by Arthur Gorges (New York: Garland, 1976); the text for all other works by Bacon is The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John M. Robertson (New York: Dutton, 1905). All citations will appear in the text.

2. For Bacon's revival of atomism, see Fulton Henry Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948).

3. Charles W. Lemmi, The Classic Deities in Bacon: A Study in Mythological Symbolism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1933), pp. 128-40, 129, 128. For the importance of providence in Bacon's program, see Sidney Warhaft, “The Providential Order in Bacon's New Philosophy,” in Francis Bacon's Legacy of Texts: “The Art of Discovery,” ed. William A. Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 151-67.

4. Cf. Of the Advancement of Learning, pp. 96-97 on Democritus's division of science from theology: “Neither doth this call in question or derogate from divine providence, but highly confirm and exalt it.” Bacon isn't the only one in the seventeenth century to argue that atomism confirms the mysterious workings of God better than does plenism; and the idea extends to the praise of a monarch who creates a masque as though out of atoms (in The King and Queenes Entertainement at Richmond, 1636).

5. Lucretius's is the seminal text in the use of principium for the atom, but the usage is common in the seventeenth century; for example, in Nicholas Hill's Philosophia Epicurea (1601, 1619). Again from Lucretius, atoms are “blind” in two senses, fortuitous and invisible. In his essay on Cupid, Bacon differentiates between Epicurus and Democritus regarding their theories of atomic motion; but he knows that whatever their differences, the two agree on the basic constituents of the universe.

6. Montaigne's interest in the Epicureans is visible on almost every page of his essays. But he writes in the tradition of humanists (Valla, More, Erasmus, and others) who revitalized the hedonism of the Greek sect.

7. “And if you like better, according to the tradition of the Greeks, to ascribe the first inventions to men; yet you would not say that Prometheus was led by speculation to the discovery of fire, or that when he first struck the flint he expected the spark; but rather that he lighted on it by accident, and (as they say) stole it from Jupiter” (De Augmentis, p. 501).

8. See Lemmi, The Classic Deities in Bacon, p. 130. In 1621 Richard Brathwaite explicitly connects Pandora to Epicurus; see Natures Embassie (Boston: Robert Roberts, 1877), p. 128.

9. Diskin Clay comments on growing scholarly care in the Renaissance over the relation between the atomists. See Lucretius and Epicurus (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 54.

10. See De Augmentis, p. 549: “It was not the Epicureans but the Stoics that troubled the ancient states.”

11. For one example of early seventeenth-century authors revaluing Epicurean pleasure, see Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: Vintage, 1977), 2:102: “A quiet mind is that voluptas, or summum bonum, of Epicurus … not to grieve, but to want cares and have a quiet soul, is the only pleasure of the world, as Seneca truly recites his opinion, not that of eating and drinking, which injurious Aristotle maliciously puts upon him, and for which he is mistaken … slandered without a cause, and lashed by all posterity.”

12. See Jerry Weinberger, Science, Faith, and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age: A Commentary on Bacon's “Advancement of Learning” (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 158-61.

13. Charles's copy of Advancement is in the British Library; his response that the Epicurean reaction against superstition leads to profanity is written in answer to the aphorism recorded in note 10 above.

14. John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989).

15. See Weinberger, Science, Faith, and Politics, pp. 159-60, on Bacon's statement in Essay 15 that “the part of Epimetheus ought well become Prometheus.”

16. In the Advancement, Bacon compares atoms in physics to the family unit in society as proof of the prime philosophy. One of the accounts of the masque involving atoms is Carew's “In Answer of an Elegiacall Letter upon the Death of the King of Sweden from Aurelian Townsend, Inviting Me to Write on that Subject.” See also Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1966), p. 344; and the entertainment recorded in note 4 above. The debate over mystery and mechanism in the masque is well known, but the investments of the court culture in science have not been fully studied. For a start, see R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 154-59; and Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press; London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), 1:13.