SOURCE: "Sir Francis Bacon and the Ideal Society," in Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 105-37.

'Ambivalence' has been seen as one of the central characteristics of the social thought of Sir Francis Bacon. He is the 'preemptory royalist' who helped to provide an intellectual basis for 'the English Revolution'; the scientific modernist consigning all past philosophy to oblivion yet unable to shake off the mental habits of the scholastic, the jargon of the alchemist and magician; the analyst of the imperfections of the human mind, carefully planning the retrieval of its dominion over nature; a constructer of self-consuming artefacts; pessimistic and optimistic, conservative and radical, timid and bold, a schemer tainted with corruption and yet possessed of a kind of integrity; Bacon, it appears, was all these things. So, likewise, his New Atlantis contains a central ambiguity: a society dominated by scientists who have the duty and the right to decide what information shall be made available to the state, but yet cannot be trusted not to lie and distort. The New Atlantis has the assured tone of Bacon's most confident works and yet he never completed it. His preoccupation with ideal-society images and with utopian notions remained so extremely ambivalent that it enables us to see at once the limitations of our ideal-society types, the way in which in practice they may overlap, the use to which they can be turned in analysing the complexities of his social thought, and the exigeant nature of the commitments imposed by the choice of a particular mode of ideal society.

Although the New Atlantis is well known as a 'utopia', it will be necessary to describe the work in considerable detail. There are two reasons for this somewhat arduous procedure. The first is that most commentaries have been unbalanced in their emphasis on the 'scientific' aspects of Bacon's ideal society. A detailed consideration of the work will show that Bacon's visualisation of an ideal society was not merely intended to serve as a backdrop to an imaginative description of his scientific schemes. The second reason is that only through a detailed consideration of the New Atlantis can both the scope and the crucial limitations of Bacon's approach to his ideal society be made clear.

Like More's Utopia, the New Atlantis may usefully, but somewhat arbitrarily, be seen in form as a drama. This approach has been used here because, although in some ways unwieldly, it does enable the work to be broken down into clear phases. Seen as a drama, the work may be divided into a Prologue and two Acts, as follows:

1. Prologue—the voyage to New Atlantis
2. Act One—New Atlantis and the outside world
   1. Scene one—initial reception
   2. Scene two—the visit of a person of place, conditions of entry fulfilled
   3. Scene three—the Stranger's House
   4. Scene four—the narrator's address to his fellow travellers
   5. Scene five—the first interview with the governor of the Stranger's House
   6. Scene six—the second interview
   7. Scene seven—the third interview
3. Act Two—New Atlantis described
   1. Scene one—the Feast of the Family
   2. Scene two—Joabim the Jew
   3. Scene three—the arrival of the Fellow of Salomon's House in Bensalem
   4. Scene four—interview with the Fellow of Salomon's House

In the Prologue the narrator describes how he and his fifty companions arrived at the island of New Atlantis. Having sailed from Peru for China and Japan, they had encountered such contrary winds for so long a period that they had consumed their twelve months' supply of victuals without sighting land and gave themselves up for lost. In despair they prayed to God 'that as in the beginning he discovered the face of the deep and brought forth dry land, so he would now discover land to us that we mought not perish'. On the following day they made landfall, and it is not without significance that Bacon emphasises that it was 'a kind of miracle' that had secured their delivery.

With the mariners' arrival at New Atlantis, the Prologue ends and the first Act begins. The theme of Act One is that of the New Atlantans' relations with the outside world. The paradox throughout is that the New Atlantans have knowledge of the affairs, learning and nature of the rest of the world, while the rest of the world remains in ignorance of them. They know without being known. In the first four scenes the difficulties and preconditions of access to New Atlantis are emphasised. 'A kind of miracle' is required to arrive there. Only in necessity, through sickness and lack of victuals, is humanitarian consideration given to the possibility of the mariners coming ashore. Before doing so, they must attest to the Christian faith, and abjure themselves of piracy and acts of violence. On disembarking, they are confined for three days under close scrutiny. Even when this confinement is relaxed, they are not allowed to travel over a mile and a half (a karan) from the city walls of Bensalem and their stay is subject to licence. These tests and restrictions on entry testify to the closed community nature of New Atlantis; only a certain type of individual is acceptable there.

The three remaining 'scenes' of the first 'Act' all take place within the Strangers' House in the form of interviews between the governor of the Strangers' House and a number of travellers. In the first of these, the governor, who was also a Christian priest, informed a delegation of six of the travellers that, their period of confinement having ended, the state had given them a license to stay for a further six weeks and that extensions of this might be permitted. In the meantime, they were to enjoy the facilities of the Strangers' House which was richly endowed, as it was thirty-seven years since its facilities had last been used. They were to be permitted to trade merchandise either for silver and gold or in barter for other goods, but they were still forbidden to travel over a mile and a half from the city wall without special leave.

Next morning, the governor visited them again. This time he talked with ten of the travellers; 'the rest were of the meaner sort, or else gone abroad'. His theme was a paradox of knowing without being known: 'by meanes of our solitary situation; and of the Lawes of Secrecy, which we have for our Travellers; and our rare Admission of Strangers; we know well most part of the Habitable World, and are ourselves unknowne'. Within this context, priority was given to the question of how the Christian faith had been made known to the New Atlantans. The answer was by a miracle. Twenty years after the ascension of Christ, a pillar of light had been seen over the sea off the east coast of the island. On top of it stood a great cross of light. Boats were sent out but some mysterious force prevented them from approaching closer to the column than a distance of sixty yards. In one of the boats was a Fellow of Salomon's House, who offered prayer to the 'Lord God of Heaven and earth'. In this prayer, he noted that one function of his 'order' was 'to discern (as far as appertaineth to the generations of men) between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts'. And, in accordance with that function, he acknowledged what was happening before them to be 'a true miracle' and begged God to grant them the interpretation of the miracle. At this, his boat was allowed to approach. The pillar and the cross disappeared, leaving 'a small Arke, or Chest of Cedar, dry and not wett at all with water, though it swam'. When taken from the water, the ark opened to reveal a book and a letter. The book contained the Old and New Testaments, including those 'Bookes of the New Testament, which were not yet written'. The letter was from one Bartholomew who revealed that he had been commanded by God to launch the ark and its contents. Although there were Hebrews, Persians and Indians in New Atlantis, as well as the native population, they were all able to read the works in their own tongue.

A number of points are worth noting about this account. The first is the priority and emphasis accorded to it by Bacon. The most important aspect of the New Atlantans' relations with the outside world, and, in particular, with their European visitors, is their common Christian faith. This is the first issue that the visitors raise in their dialogue with the governor of the Strangers' House, and he comments on the appropriateness of their priority. It reflects both the seriousness with which Bacon held his own Christian faith and his belief in the Christian religion as a good guarantee of social order.

The second point worth noting is the miraculous course of the conversion of New Atlantis. It is beyond doubt, irrational and complete. Faith, not reason, is the only means by which it can be interpreted. And this, of course, is a typical reflection of Bacon's distinction between faith as a means of knowing God and reason as a means of interpreting nature. But like Bacon himself, the Fellows of Salomon's House take all learning, and not merely what we would describe as natural science, for their province. Hence their duty of discerning 'between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts', and the Fellow's ability to certify this particular event a miracle. This ability is dependent upon his recognition of the peculiar basis of knowledge of the divine.

On the following day the travellers were once more visited by the governor who was again charged to explain how the New Atlantans could know so much of Europe whilst remaining unknown to Europeans. This interview, or 'scene', is taken up with an historical explanation of the seclusion enjoyed by the island. The governor first explained why other nations had no communications with New Atlantis. Three thousand years before, the island had been part of a worldwide network oftraffic on a scale far greater than existed at the end of the sixteenth century. Their nearest great neighbour, Atlantis, on the American mainland, had launched two expeditions: one to the Mediterranean, from which no one had returned, and the other to the South Seas and the island of New Atlantis, where they were decisively outmaneuvered by King Altabin. Less than a century after these events, Atlantis was visited by divine retribution for these 'proud enterprises' and destroyed in a great flood. As a result, the natives of America, descendants of the Atlantans, remained a primitive people. In addition, the basis of commercial relations between New Atlantis and their closest neighbour, America, had collapsed. At about the same time, there had been a great decline in navigation elsewhere. Partly this was caused by war, partly 'by a naturall Revolution of Time' (from which, apparently, New Atlantis was immune), and partly by the development of vessels unsuitable for long voyages.

The problem remained as to why New Atlantans had accepted this isolation, for their shipping capacity and navigational skill had remained unimpaired. The answer, according to the governor of the Strangers' House, lay in decisions taken by King Solamona who had reigned about 1900 years before. Solamona viewed his country as self-sufficient. The island was large, fertile, and offered sufficient opportunities for its shipping in coastal trade, fishing and traffic to some nearby islands.

And recalling into his memory, the happy and flourishing Estate, wherein this land then was; So as it mought bee a thousand wayes altered to the worse, but scarce any one way to the better; thought nothing wanted to his Noble and Heroicale Intentions, but onley (as farr as Humane foresight mought reach) to give perpetuitie to that which was in his time so happily established.

Thus, unlike Utopus, Solamona was no great state maker. He found a society which had every appearance of felicity, and sought to perpetuate that happy state by securing it from 'Novelties, and a Commixture of Manners'. Accordingly, he stopped the free entrance of strangers and the free exit of New Atlantans and made his policy of seclusion part of the 'Fundamentall Lawes' of his kingdom.

The governor contrasted the isolationist policy of New Atlantis with that of China. The former still admitted of humanity to strangers. Unlike the Chinese, the New Atlantans detained no one against their will, although they sought to make continued residence as attractive as possible, and, in fact, only thirteen visitors had ever chosen to leave. Finally the Chinese were freely allowed to travel abroad, but this was forbidden to the New Atlantans, with only one exception. 'Now for our travelling from hence into parts abroad, our Lawgiver thought fit altogether to restrain it … But this restraint of ours hath only one exception, which is admirable; preserving the good which cometh by communicating with strangers, and avoiding the hurt.'

The exception completes the explanation of the paradox of the isolation of New Atlantis, and, with it, what I have called Act One. It explains how the New Atlantans, unknown to others, know them so well. It also introduces what most commentators have seen as the key feature of Bacon's idealsociety, Salomon's House or the College of the Six Days' Work:

amongst the Excellent Acts of that King, one above all hath the preheminence. It was the Erection, and Instillation of an Order, or Society, which wee call Salomon's House; The Noblest Foundation, (as wee thinke), that ever was upon the Earth; and the Lanthorne of this Kingdome. It is dedicated to the Study of the Works, and Creatures of God.

Every twelve years, two ships were sent out from New Atlantis, each carrying a mission of three Fellows of Salomon's House. They were commissioned to investigate assigned countries, 'And especially of the Sciences, Arts, Manufactures, and Inventions of all the World; and withall to bring unto us, Bookes, Instruments, and Patterns, in every kinde.' The ships returned immediately after landing the Fellows, who continued incognito their intellectual, technical and cultural espionage until the next expedition came twelve years later and picked them up. So the explanation of the paradox is complete. New Atlantis possessed full knowledge of the outside world without being corrupted by it. Of course, this place a heavy burden on the integrity of the Fellows of Salomon's House. For twelve long years, as they search for knowledge to take back with them, they are exposed to the corrupting influences of the world outside. Bacon did not discuss the point. He would appear to have assumed that they were capable of sustaining the burden. This silent assumption, as we shall see, is not without its significance.

With the opening of the second 'Act' the scene shifts from inside the Strangers' House to the society outside. The period of confinement had ended and the visitors now wandered freely in Bensalem and became acquainted with residents of the city, though 'not of the meanest Quality'. As the scene shifts so the topic of concern changes from the relationship between New Atlantis and the outside world to the society of New Atlantis itself: 'continually we mett with many things, right worthy of observation & Relation: As indeed, if ther be a mirrour in the World, worthy to hold Mens Eyes, it is that Countrey.' The Act falls into four scenes: the Feast of the Family, the dialogue with Joabim the Jew, the arrival of the Fellow of Salomon's House, and, finally, his discourse on the work of that institution.

One day, two of the visitors were invited to a celebration of the Feast of the Family. 'A most natural, pious and reverned custom it is, showing that nation to be compounded of all goodness.' Any man living to see thirty persons descended from his body, alive and over three years old, might hold this feast at the cost of the state. Two days before the Feast, the father, or Tirsan as he was now to be known, with three friends and the assistance of the governor of the city or place, held council with all the members of the family. At this meeting, quarrels were settled, the distressed were relieved, the vicious reproved and disciplined and marriage plans arranged. The governor was prepared to use his public authority to enforce the decrees of the Tirsan, though this was seldom necessary, 'such reverence and obedience they give, to the Order of Nature'. Discipline and harmony having been established, the Tirsan chose one man from amongst his sons to live with him and this individual was known thereafter as the Son of Vine. The Feast day itself began with divine service which was followed by a procession honouring the Tirsan. In the course of this, heralds arrived bringing a royal charter conveying privileges and rewards to him: 'the King is Debter to no Man, but for Propagation of his subjects'. Then followed a ceremonial feast in which the Tirsan was waited upon by his family, sharing his magnificence only with such of his children as happen to be Fellows of Salomon's House. This celebration of propagation, fecundity and longevity involves a sharp contrast with what we know of the evanescent nucleated kinship group of Bacon's own day. Still more significant, perhaps, is the disciplinary and conflict-resolving function accorded to the patriarchal family, for, apart from this reference, there is no discussion of how conflict and social disorder are dealt with in New Atlantis. Bacon shared, somewhat incipiently, the patriarchalist attitudes common in his day. The Feast itself was accompanied by a hymn celebrating Adam, Noah and Abraham, 'whereof the former two peopled the world, and the last was the Father of the Faithful'. Elsewhere in his works, Bacon employed the patriarchalist's parallels between the authority of father over family, king over country and God over creation. He was also of the opinion that parricide was a form of treason and should be treated as such at law.

The second scene of this second Act continues the examination of the New Atlantan family. In it, the narrator makes the makes the acquaintance of Joabim, who was a Jewish Merchant.

For they have some few Strips of Jewes, yet remaining amongst them, whom they leave to their owne Religion. Which they may better doe, because they are of a farre differing disposition from the Jewes in other Parts. For whereas they hate the Name of Christ; And have a secret inbred rancour against the People amongst whom they live; These (contrariwise) give unto our Saviour many high Attributes, and love the Nation of Bensalem, extreamely.

Joabim, for example, acknowledged Christ's virgin birth and that he was more than a man and is now God's ruler of the seraphims. He saw the laws of Bensalem as Mosaic in origin. This moderate semitism was necessary to enable Jews to meet Bacon's tests on entry to his ideal society, and also to provide against conflict between Christian and Jew, but more broadly significant is the connection between this image of a Christianised Jewry in an ideal society and the notion of the conversion of the Jews as a precursor of the latter day glory and, accompanying it, the Great Instauration, or restoration of man's pristine dominion over nature. We shall see this juxtaposition of themes most fully developed in Samuel Gott's Nova Solyma.

Bensalem, according to Joabim, is 'the Virgin of the World': 'there is not under the Heavens, so chast a Nation, as this of Bensalem. Nor so free from all pollution or foulenesse.' There are 'no Stewes, no dissolute Houses, no Curtisans, nor anything of that kind'. Homosexuality is unknown. By contrast, Joabim noted, in Europe single men were impure; marriage was 'but an office', most frequently merely a commercial bargain; the married were indifferent to the procreation of children; adultery was common. Not only is this critical analysis of sexual mores and marriage the single aspect of European life discussed in the work, but, apart from Salomon's House, marriage and the family are the only features of New Atlantan society dealt with in any detail. In New Atlantis polygamy was forbidden. No couple could marry or make a contract until one month after their first meeting. Curiously, in relation to Bacon's emphasis on patriarchal authority elsewhere, marriage without parental consent was not void, but the children of such marriages were not allowed to inherit above one-third of their parents' inheritance. The New Atlantans had explicitly rejected More's utopian device for direct naked viewing of the betrothed, as possibly hurtful to anyone spurned. Instead, because of 'many hidden defects in men and women's bodies', they had instituted a more indirect system of examination on a non-obligatory basis.

The third scene described the entry into Bensalem of one of the Fellows of Salomon's House. Joabim had secured a good vantage point for the narrator who describes in detail the magnificence and pomp with which the Fellow's entry was made. The latter sought 'to avoid all tumult and trouble' but, perhaps because this was the first view of a Fellow to Bensalem in the last dozen years, there was an elaborate procession in which all the officers of the City Companies appeared. The discipline of the people lining the streets was carefully noted. 'The street was wonderfully well kept; so that ther was never any Army had their men stand in better Battle-Array, then the People stood. The windowes likewise were not crowded, but every one stood in them as if they had been placed.' So the importance and prestige of the Fellows of Salomon's House and the good order of the people were underlined.

The fourth and final scene takes the form of a meeting between the narrator and the Fellow of Salomon's House and the Fellow's discourse describing the work of the foundation. Once more Bacon emphasised the status of the Fellow.

He was sat upon a low throne richly adorned, and a rich cloth of state over his head, of blue satin embroidered. He was alone save that he had two pages of honour, on either hand one, finely attired in white. His undergarments were the like that we saw him wear in the chariot; but instead of his gown, he had on him a mantle with a cape, of the same fine black fastened about him. When we came in, as we were taught, we bowed low at our first entrance; and when we were come near his chair, he stood up holding forth his hand ungloved, and in posture of blessing; and we, everyone of us stooped down, and kissed the hem of his tippet.

The Fellow, speaking in Spanish, informed the narrator that he was going to give him his 'greatest Jewell', a description of Salomon's House and its works. The description is broken into four sections. First, 'The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and Secrett Motions of Things: and the Enlarging of the bounds of Humane Empire, to the Effecting of all Things Possible.' Then follows a very long section detailing the foundation's arrangements for the study of natural phenomena. Included in this most familiar part of the New Atlantis are mines, towers, zoological and botanical gardens, lakes, furnaces, perspective and sound houses, engineering shops, a 'Mathematicall House' and 'Houses of Deceits of the senses'. Most of the effort here appears to be employed in the compilation of what Bacon would have described as a natural history. Such discoveries as had immediate application were put into use throughout the kingdom, but the emphasis is upon the collection of data. Objectivity and scrupulousness are at a premium: 'wee doe hate all Impostures and Lies: Insomuch as wee have severely forbidden it to all our Fellowes under paine of Ignominy and Fines, that they doe not shew any Naturall Worke or Thing, Adorned or Swelling; but onely Pure as it is, and without all Affectation of Strangenesse'. The third section of the Fellow's discourse deals with the 'Employments and offices of our Fellows'. Their duties were arranged so that data was collected, used to furnish axiomatic conclusions and so to direct further investigation. Twelve of the Fellows were engaged on overseas expeditions and the rest of them were divided into groups of three. The 'Depredatours' collected experiments from books and the 'Mystery-Men' collected them from mechanical arts, liberal sciences and elsewhere. Another trio, the 'Pioneers or Miners', performed new experiments, while the 'Compilers' drew the information so far gathered into convenient form. Out of this collection, three fellows called 'Benefactors' culled anything of immediate use in practice or theory. As a result of continual reviews of the current state of knowledge, three fellows, known as 'Lamps', were able to direct new experiments, which were carried out and reported on by the 'Inoculators'. Finally three 'Interpretators of Nature' induced from all this information 'greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms'. In addition the college housed novices and apprentices and a great number of servants. The disposition of the knowledge acquired in this way appears to be quite firmly in the hands of the Fellows. 'We have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all an oath of secrecy, for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret: though some of those we do reveal sometimes to the state, and some not.' Bacon was well aware that technical skill and knowledge could be put to evil, as well as good, uses. Here he chose to place the moral responsibility in the hands of the men of learning rather than in those of the state.

The fourth and final section of the Fellow's discourse deals rather sketchily with what are described as the 'Ordinances and Rites' of Salomon's House. They had a museum consisting of two galleries. One contained patterns and samples of the best inventions known to them. The other housed statues of discoverers, like Columbus, and of the inventors of such things as music, gunpowder, letters, observations in astronomy, printing, glass, metal and bread. Every day the Fellows gave thanks to God for his 'Marveillous Works' and implored his aid in illuminating their labours and turning them to use. Periodically, they undertook tours to inform the cities of New Atlantis of new and profitable discoveries, and also to assist them with preparations against illness and natural disaster. Judging from the fact that Bensalem had not seen any of the Fellows for twelve years, Bacon did not intend this education function of the foundation to be taken too seriously. So, with the Fellow's blessing and a gift of a thousand ducats, the interview and the description of New Atlantis ends.

About a third of the book is thus taken up with the treatment of relations between New Atlantis and the outside world. The same space is required for a description of the work of Salomon's House. The rest is given over to a discussion of the family and marriage, and to general support material. It is, perhaps, a testament to Bacon's literary skill that we first read the New Atlantis without realising how little he has in fact told us about his ideal society and its institutions. There is no description of the island itself, so that we have no idea of its size, population or the number of cities on it. It wasa monarchy but beyond that we know virtually nothing of its governmental institutions. Bacon clearly believed that factional politics was inevitable in an aristocratic society, but he offered no explanation of the elimination, or otherwise, of faction in New Atlantis. There were social gradations in the ideal society but what they were and whether there was an hereditary nobility we do not know. Similarly we are not told how the island was defended, nor what its military organisation was. There is no mention of any judicial organisation beyond the exceptional jurisdiction exercised over a limited field by the Tirsan. Production and distribution of goods, land settlement, provision for the poor; none of these topics, all of which Bacon showed interest in elsewhere, are dealt with in the New Atlantis. In the 1590s Bacon had written, 'Trust not to your laws for correcting the times, but give all strength to good education; see to the government of your universities and of all seminaries of youth, and to the private order of families, maintaining due obedience of children towards their parents, and reverence of the younger sort towards the ancient.' The Feast of the Family is in part, at least, an arrangement to comply with the second part of this advice, but nothing is known of the educational institutions or arrangements of the New Atlantans. Finally, what religious settlement existed in the ideal society? We know that there were priests and that Jews were tolerated but, apart from this, nothing. Are the Fellows of Salomon's House, who clearly played an important part in the religious life of New Atlantis, also priests? Bacon provided no answer. Perhaps most astonishing of all is our lack of knowledge of the House of Salomon. Bacon described in great detail the work of the foundation but said very little about its organisation. How were Fellows recruited? What were their conditions of service? How were they controlled and allocated their work? How was the foundation financed and what determined its relationship with society at large? That we know so little about the institution on which Bacon lavished most attention in his short fiction must form a key to any valid interpretation of the work as a whole.

The fact that Bacon left so many questions unanswered obviously makes it difficult to characterise the work. A number of apparently utopian elements appear in his description of the ideal society of New Atlantis. Amongst the institutions mentioned or implied are the Strangers' House, the Infirmary, Salomon's House, the City Companies and the municipal government. The difficulty is that many of these are merely mentioned and we are given very little, if any, idea of their organisation, purpose and rôle in relation to the rest of society. The same may be said of the handful of officials referred to. Mention is made of 'Fundamentall Lawes' but, beyond restrictions on the entry of foreigners, no details are given. There is, as we have seen, a disciplinary and conflict-resolving function allocated to fathers preparing for the Feast of the Family, but, given infant mortality rates and life expectancy, this can hardly have been expected to provide the basis for a general social order. Apart from this, the only general regulations that appear are the inheritance restrictions on the offspring of marriages without parental consent, the injunction against this, and one against deception by the Fellows of Salomon's House. It may be this very lack of institutional and legal completeness, verging on confusion, which has led some commentators [e.g., Joseph Anthony Mazzeo in his Renaissance and Revolution: The Remaking of European Thought, 1967] to characterise the New Atlantis as a realisable ideal.

The crucial problem, however, is the nature of that ideal. For, while there are elements of discipline by regulation and bits and pieces of what might be an institutional and bureaucratic apparatus, the description of New Atlantis is too superficial for it to be labelled utopian in the sense already elaborated. There are, moreover, hints that we are dealing with a community of self-regulating individuals, with a community of moral paragons, a perfect moral commonwealth [see V. Dupont's L'Utopie et le Roman Utopique dans la Littérature Anglaise, 1941]: 'we were come', the mariners decided, 'into a land of angels, which did appear to us daily and prevent us with comforts, which we thought not of much less expected'; 'we were apt enough to think there was somewhat supernatural in this island; but yet rather as angelical than magical'; 'there is not under the Heavens, so chast a Nation, as this of Bensalem. Nor so free from all pollution or foulenesse. It is the Virgin of the World.' The basis of this unrivalled chastity are the New Atlantans' twin maxims: 'That whosoever is unchaste cannot reverence himself'; and, 'That the Reverence of a Mans selfe, is next Religion, the chiefest Bridle of all Vices'. In the Tirsan's preparations for the Feast of the Family, provision was made for the city governor to give substance to his authority, but this was seldom needed, 'such reverence and obedience they give, to the Order of Nature'. New arrivals were carefully screened to maintain this general sense of moral responsibility. There is a sense in which, as Harold Osborne remarked [in his Bacon 'New Atlantis', 1937], the social institutions of New Atlantis were rather expressions of the character of the people than formative of it.

But this is not the complete picture, for, while such emphasis was placed upon self-respect, self-control, internalised moral authority, nevertheless, some, admittedly very limited, social discipline and regulation was envisaged. The laws which limited the rights of those who defy patriarchal authority and marry without parental consent assumed that such defiance would and did take place. There is no nation on earth as chaste as Bensalem and yet it remains a function of the Tirsan to suppress vice in his family. Throughout the New Atlantis run contradictory suggestions of moral perfection and moral failure, suppression unnecessary and suppression in operation. In other words, the leitmotif pervading the work is the unresolved tension between perfect moral commonwealth and utopian ideals.

It has been shown that implicit in Bacon's vision of a new learning was an alteration in the conception of the learned man. The virtues of this ideal were not purely intellectual. Indeed Bacon attacked reliance on pure intellect. As the fatal sin remains pride, so the key virtue is charity. 'The identification of scientific truth with use and therefore with charity, with power and therefore with pity, is fundamental to Bacon's conception of true learning.' 'Bacon often leaves the impression that the career of science is something of a religion in its selflessness and sense of dedication, and he at times spoke of the future scientists as though they were a priesthood' [Moody E. Prior, "Bacon's Man of Science," 1968]. This saint-like image of the man of learning is clearly apparent in Bacon's treatment of the Fellows of Salomon's House and the relationship between them and society at large. The Fellow who paraded through the streets of Bensalem had 'an Aspect as if he pittied them' and while he arrived in great state he was careful to 'avoid all tumult and trouble'. 'He held up his bare hand as he went, as blessing the people, but in silence.' The Fellows of Salomon's House appear asa species of moral superman. While their fellow citizens are carefully shielded from the corrupting influences of the outside world, they, as we have seen, are deemed capable of withstanding them on their twelve year long expeditions of enquiry. Again, Bacon was well aware of the corrupting influence of power, but his learned paragons exercise it in high degree without deleterious effects. The philosophers in New Atlantis may not rule in any clearly expressed sense, but, as Mazzeo has pointed out [in his Renaissance and Revolution, 1967], they retain the power of technological innovation and with it the capacity to alter the conditions of life, if not the structure of society. Their collective moral responsibility even extends to deciding what knowledge shall be passed on to society at large. In New Atlantis the philosophers exercised a benevolent censorship even against the state, and Bacon appears to have assumed away the wider problems of political control under cover of the perfect moral character of the scientist. One is almost tempted to describe the result as a perfect moral commonwealth under the guidance of a benevolent, but unrestrained, moral élite, the Fellows of Salomon's House. Bacon's image of them has been described by one authority [Prior] as 'possibly too flattering to human nature'.

But even here Bacon hesitated and drew back. The optimism of the New Atlantis is not entirely 'unguarded', Bacon's faith in human rationality, human goodness not quite 'unbounded'. He admitted that the Fellows of Salomon's House might be tempted to lie about and to distort what they had learned; that their integrity was vulnerable. It was necessary to legislate accordingly. 'But wee doe hate all Impostures and Lies: Insomuch as wee have severely forbidden it to all our Fellowes under paine of Ignominy and Fines, that they doe not shew any Naturall Worke or Thing, Adorned or Swelling; but onely Pure as it is, and without all Affectation of Strangenesse.' Once, however, Bacon had admitted the moral fallibility of the Fellows in one thing (particularly in such an important thing as this) then he had raised the question of it in all things. If the Fellows could be motivated to deceive and distort, why could they not be tempted to exploit?

Bacon left so many loose ends in the New Atlantis >that it is tempting to return to the explanation that it was 'Worke unfinished', half thought out, hastily executed, never intended for publication. Unfortunately there are difficulties here too. Partly these arise from the vexed question of when the work was written. Here the commentators are in considerable disarray. They fall basically into two groups: those who see it as a product of Bacon's last years, after his fall from office, and those who would attribute it to an earlier period of his life. An intelligent compromise suggestion [by Mazzeo] has been that Bacon first drafted the work in the period 1614-17 and revised it for publication in, or about, 1623. Clearly, if the New Atlantis was subject to a process of revision it becomes impossible to explain away its inconsistencies, its unresolved problems, in terms of the author's haste or his unwillingness to put his work before an audience. Whatever the date at which the New Atlantis was written, and it is doubtful whether this can be established with any precision, the significant point is that the cardinal ideas of the work had engaged Bacon's mind for a period of over thirty years of his life. In 1594, for the Christmas revels at Grays Inn, he composed a number of speeches as part of a masque in which counsellors addressed a mock monarch. The second counsellor advised the study of philosophy and commended four principal works or monuments. The first was 'the collecting of a most perfect and general library, wherein whatsoever the wit of man hath heretofore committed to books of worth be they ancient or modern, printed or manuscript, European or other parts, of one or other language, may be made contributory to your wisdom'. Second, came a garden of all plants, a collection of all rare beasts and birds, and two lakes, one of salt water and the other of fresh: 'in small compass a model of universal nature made private'. Next was 'a goodly huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of many by exquisite art or engine hath made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularly chance and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature hath wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included'. The last of the four works was the construction of 'such a stillhouse, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels, as may be a palace fit for a philosopher's stone'. The parallels between these four works or monuments and the 'Preparations and Instruments' of Salomon's House are too obvious to require much comment. Even more significant in this context is that, along with this, in the address of the Fifth Counsellor, Bacon coupled an appeal for governmental perfection, for 'Virtue and a gracious Government'. The prince was urged to seek inward peace; to visit all parts of his dominions, setting wrongs right; to check the faults of his great servants; to advance men of virtue and to repress faction; to reform the law, purging it of multiplicity and obscurity, and ensuring its execution; to back up the authority of the laws with good education in universities, schools and the home; and, finally, to seek prosperity. Thus, as early as 1594, the institutional advancement of learning and the notion of political perfection were linked by Bacon in a single design. The civil model of New Atlantis, as well as the intellectual, was prefigured. In July 1608 Bacon spent seven days on a detailed review of his affairs. Again, the twin projects of a new type of learned institution and political reform were in his mind at the same time. In his notes for 26 July, he wrote, 'Foundac. of a college for Inventors. 2 Galeries W^th. statuas or bases for Inventors to come. And a Library and an Inginary.' He went on to make sketchy remarks about the rules, allowances, and secrecy necessary in connection with such an establishment. Two days later he was making notes of a scheme for the drafting of new laws and the amendment of old, towards the compilation of an ideal code of law.

Whenever the New Atlantis, as we know it now, was written, the point that needs to be repeated is that what Rawley [in his prefare to New Atlantis, 1624] considered to be the two cardinal features of the work, the scientific institution and the ideal society, were linked in Bacon's thought and writing over a period of at least thirty years. Given the longevity of the idea in Bacon's mind, it becomes difficult to accept the suggestion that the inconsistency and lack of development in the New Atlantis are entirely attributable to lack of thought, care and time. Moreover, if one relates this issue to the way in which he dealt with different types of ideal-society notions in his works, one becomes aware of a profound unwillingness, on Bacon's part, to be committed to any form of ideal society. Four of our ideal society types—the millennium, arcadia, the perfect moral commonwealth and Utopia—impinged upon Bacon's thought and the impact of the last two was particularly strong. Yet in the end he remained aloof, detached from all of them. He was torn between an impulse to idealise and a scepticism about, if not a distaste for, the ideal. Whenever he committed himself to one of the ideal-society modes available to him, Bacon encountered amongst its exigencies features unacceptable to him and this was particularly so with the Utopian mode. It is this which provides themost probable explanation of the problems of the New Atlantis.

Bacon's chiliastic references were tantalisingly scant and perfunctory. He used Daniel's prophecy, that learning would increase in the autumn of the world, to bolster an optimistic view of intellectual progress, and commented on the predictability of religious controversy in these 'latter days'. As we have seen in the New Atlantis, he played with the juxtaposition of a Christianised Jewry, a Great Instauration, and, by inference, a latter-day glory. These were hardly more than early-seventeenth-century conventionalities. Nowhere does Bacon set out systematically to examine millenarian ideas and their implications. Much more important and central to his thought was an arcadian strain arising out of his view of the ethico-religious end of the advancement of learning. As 'the proud knowledge of good and evil' had brought about the fall of man, so, Bacon argued, 'the pure knowledge of nature and universality' would lead to man's recovery of his original command over the creation. Thus, 'natural philosophy proposes to itself; as its noblest work of all nothing less than the restitution and renovation of things corruptible'.

And therefore it is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honour or fame, nor inablement for business, that are the true ends of knowledge; some of these being more worthy than other, though all inferior and degenerate: but it is a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power … which he had in his first state of creation.

It was Bacon's truly astonishing claim that it was the business of learning to undo the consequences of the fall of man. He was not always prepared to see this as a possibility of complete recovery. In Valerius Terminus he wrote,

It is true, that in two points the curse is preremptory, and not to be removed; the one that vanity must be the end in all human effects, eternity being resumed, though the revolutions and periods may be delayed. The other that the consent of the creature being now turned into reluctation, this power cannot be otherwise exercised and administered but with labour…

Later, in more optimistic vein, Bacon argued that, as a result of the fall, man lost both his innocence and his dominion of the creation, but that he might recover 'the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences'. Labour would remain indispensable to progress in the arts and sciences but the inevitability of vanity was not mentioned. This recovery of human innocence and command of nature could clearly lead to an arcadian view of the ideal society as the Garden of Eden regained. At least one commentator [Paolo Rossi in Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, 1968] >has seen the New Atlantis in this light as an evocation of 'the happy existence of mankind before the Flood'. Unfortunately there is little to justify this and little of the Arcadian in Bacon's social thought. He never examined in any systematic way what the recovery of a pre-lapsarian state would mean in terms of men's mastery over themselves and over each other. At times he even permitted himself to doubt whether man could attain to knowledge of the highest laws of nature and hence to complete command over the natural universe.

On the other hand, Bacon frequently used the language and forms of the perfect moral commonwealth tradition. A good illustration of this may be found in the New Year letter he wrote to James I in January 1618.

I do many times with gladness and for a remedy of my other labours, revolve in my mind the great happiness which God (of his singular goodness) hath accumulated upon your Majesty every way; and how complete the same would be, if the state of your means were once rectified, and well ordered. Your people militar and obedient; fit for war, used to peace. Your Church illightened with good preachers, as a heaven of stars. Your judges learned, and learning from you; just, and just by your example. Your nobility in a right distance between crown and people; no oppressors of the people, no overshadowers of the crown. Your Council full of tribute of care, faith, and freedom. Your gentlemen and justices of the peace willing to apply your royal mandates to the nature of their several countries, but ready to obey. Your servants in awe of your wisdom, in hope of your goodness. The fields growing every day by the improvement and recovery of grounds, from the desert to the garden. The city grown from wood to brick. Your sea-walls or pomoerium of your island surveyed and in edifying. Your merchants embracing the whole compass of the world, east, west, north and south. The times give you peace, and yet offer you opportunities of action abroad. And lastly, your excellent royal issue entaileth these blessings and favours of God to descend to all posterity.

Of course, there is a strong element of flattery in this, but the approach employed is significant. Moreover, the flattery motive cannot have been a serious factor in shaping the description of Elizabeth I's reign which Bacon published in The Advancement of Learning two years after her death. Here again 'the conjunction of learning in the prince with felicity in the people' is the theme. Elizabeth's rule, according to Bacon, was marked by a period of constant peace and security, when the truth of religion was established, justice administered well, the prerogative used with discretion, learning flourished, both crown and subject enjoyed a 'convenient estate and means', and obedience became habitual. The idea that a happy and harmonious society could be achieved by the conscientious pursuit of civil morality by rulers, officials and subjects is quite clear here, as it is in Bacon's long letter of advice to George Villiers, when first he became favourite of James I.

Bacon's defence of learning hung in part on the conviction that learning could play a key rôle in the attainment of civil morality and social harmony. The learned man was a man equipped for conscientious morality and self-improvement. 'For the unlearned man knows not what it is to descend into himself or to call himself to account, nor the pleasure of that suavissima vita, indies sentire se fieri meliorem.' Men are governed by two faculties, force and reason: 'the one is brute the other divine.' Learning, by fostering the rational in man, as opposed to the brute, makes him amenable to government. 'And it is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men gentle, generous, maniable, and plaint to government; whereas ignorance makes them churlish, thwart and mutinous: and the evidence of time doth clear this assertion, considering that the most barbarous, rude, and unlearned times have been the most subject to tumults, seditions and changes.' Though learned men, contemplative rather than active, may lack experience of 'ragioni di stato ', 'yet on the other side, to recompense that, they are perfect in those same plain grounds of religion, justice, honour, and moral virtue; which if they be well and watchfully pursued, there will seldom be use of those other, no more than of physic in a sound or well-dieted body'. Indeed, it was no more difficult for the learned man to pursue true virtue than it was for the politician to adhere to reason of state. If learned men had any fault, in this respect, it was that 'they contend sometimes too far to bring things to perfection, and to reduce the corruption of manners to honesty or precepts or examples of too great height'.

The perfect moral commonwealth element in Bacon's thinking was then closely associated with his conception of the man of learning, and, as we have seen, this carries over into the New Atlantis. But, as before, Bacon could not go the whole way. He did not commit himself. Even while speaking of the moral appeal and potency of learning, he had to admit the tenuousness of its hold:

the nature and condition of men; who are full of savage and unreclaimed desires, of profit, of lust, of revenge, which as long as they give ear to precepts, to laws, to religion, sweetly touched with eloquence and persuasions of books, of sermons, of harangues, so long is society and peace maintained; but, if these instruments be silent, or that sedition and tumult make them not audible, all things dissolve into anarchy and confusion.

There were limits to men's capacity for self-control and self-discipline. 'Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished'; 'let not a man trust his victory over his nature too far; for nature will lay buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation'. By the same token, even the best of monarchs could be 'depraved by the long habit of ruling'. So man's vulnerability to temptation and to the corrupting influence of power remained, crippling Bacon's willingness to commit himself to the vision of a perfect moral commonwealth. In his advice to James I on the disposal of Sutton's estate, he pointed out that the will to morality, good intentions, were not enough. Without 'such ordinances and institutions as may preserve the same from turning corrupt, or at least from becoming unsavoury and of little use', they were doomed to disappointment. Bacon was lifting his eyes from the vision of a society of conscientiously self-disciplined men of good will, a perfect moral commonwealth, to the legal and institutional guarantees of the performance of social good, that is towards Utopia.

Bacon's interest in institutional methods of co-ordinating and controlling the behaviour of men is clearly apparent in his critical approach to past philosophy. It suffered from self-indulgent individualism: 'one catches at one thing, another at another; each has his own favourite fancy; pure and open light there is none; every one philosophises out of the cells of his own imagination, as out of Plato's cave'. To remedy this situation Bacon provided his elaborate programme and method on the assumption that 'the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its course, but guided at every step, and the business be done as if by machinery'. The co-ordination of individual men's efforts was a key feature of his scientific method. And it was the method itself which was to provide the unifying force to which each worker must submit himself. In Valerius Terminus he suggested that knowledge should be administered as the king of Spain administered his dominions, with men absorbed in specialised or regional duties but subject to central control and direction. In the New Atlantis we find the work of the Fellows of Salomon's House organised on this kind of pattern. When he considered the advancement of learning, Bacon accorded a place of priority to the institutional framework—'foundations and buildings, endowments with revenues, endowments with franchises and privileges, institutions and ordinances for government'—without which progress was impossible. Again, this concern with academic institutions is to be found clearly reflected in the New Atlantis and Salomon's House. On the other hand, apart from some remarks on government by commission, Bacon showed little general interest in governmental institutions. He did not feel that any particular form of government was possessed of divine sanction. God allowed civil government (as he allowed ecclesiastical government)

to be varied according to time and place and accidents, which nevertheless his high and divine providence doth order and dispose. For all civil governments are restrained from God unto the general grounds of justice and manners, but that policies and forms of them are left free. So that monarchies and kingdoms, senates and seignories, popular states or communalities, are all lawful, and where they are planted ought to be maintained inviolate.

In his discussion "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates", he followed Machiavelli in identifying greatness with capacity for war, but the key factors were population and spirit, not organisation or institutions.

It might be expected that Bacon, as a professional lawyer, would have had a dynamic view of law as a means of moulding the will and behaviour of men. Certainly there were occasions when he expressed the opinion that the law could be used more vigorously. The education of youth was a topic upon which, as Bacon saw it, philosophy spoke too much and laws too little. What he most admired in Henry VII was his ability as a lawmaker, an aspect of statesmanship which he found too often neglected by historians. In discussing duelling, Bacon utilised the concept of law as a means of combatting the defects of man's nature. 'Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.' Perhaps the clearest discussion Bacon produced of the legislator's approach to a specific social problem was his essay 'Of Usury'. Whilst usury had deplorable social effects, it had to be permitted because of the harshness of men's hearts, since without it they would not lend to those in need. The latter fell into two categories: those seeking relief from destruction, and those seeking commercial capital. Bacon therefore proposed that anyone might lend to the poor at a maximum rate of five per cent interest, while the supply of commercial capital should be at higher rates and subject to licence. Astonishingly enough, for a man who was to be Lord Chancellor of England, Bacon showed no recognition of the practical and legal difficulties involved in a proposal of this kind. Yet he had complained, as early as the mid 1590s, of the multiplication of ineffective laws. Moreover, this pessimism about law's potential for the production of clear-cut solutions to problems was much more typical of him. Law, he argued, might solve old problems but, in the very process of doing so, it tended to create new ones. 'For new laws are like the apothecaries' drugs; though they remedy the disease, yet they trouble the body … ' He saw no capacity in the law for eliminating envy, greed, ambition, faction, anger or the depredations of cunning and corrupt men. The baser side of human nature would find a way round institutional and legal obstacles for the working of its ill-will.

Although Bacon maintained a lifelong interest in the compilation and amendment of English law it would hardly be correct to describe him as a law reformer. He was concerned rather with the clarity and expression of the law rather than with its substance: 'what I shall propound is not to the matter of the laws, but to the manner of their registry, expression and tradition: so that it giveth them rather light than any new nature'; 'the entire body and substance of law shall remain, only discharged of idle and unprofitable or hurtful matter; and illustrated by order and other helps, towards the better understanding of it, and judgement thereupon'. Thus, his approach to legal science, like his approach to natural science, could be inductive. His criticism of contemporary lawyers—'they write according to the states where they live, what is received law, and not what ought to be law'—is almost a parody of his own professional attitude.

Far more important than law itself in moving the will of men and influencing their behaviour was custom. It was 'the principal magistrate of man's life'.

Men's thoughts are much according to their inclination; their discourse and speeches according to their learning and infused opinions: but their deeds are after as they have been accustomed. And therefore as Machiavel well noteth (though in an evil-favoured instance,) there is no trusting to the force of nature or to the bravery of words, except it be corroborate by custom … insomuch as a man would wonder to hear men profess, protest, engage, give great words, and then do just as they have done before; as if they were dead images, and engines moved only by the wheels of custom.

Custom alone was capable of altering and subduing men's natures, and, when socially endorsed, it was particularly strong: 'if the force of custom simple and separate be great, the force of custom copulate and conjoined and collegiate is far greater. For there example teacheth, company comforteth, emulation quickeneth, glory raiseth … Certainly the great multiplication of virtues upon human nature resteth upon societies well ordained and disciplined.

Herein, of course, lay the problem. Custom alone moulded the behaviour of men but how were good customs to be obtained and bad customs suppressed? Thought, persuasion, law were not enough. Bacon knew well enough that the problem was not to find models for the behaviour of men, but to find means of making men adhere to a good pattern of behaviour. In discussing the science of 'the Appetite and Will of Man', he wrote:

In the handling of this science, those which have written seem to me to have done as if a man that professeth to teach to write did only exhibit fair copies of alphabets and letters joined, without giving any precepts or directions for the carriage of the hand and framing of the letters. So have they made good and fair exemplars and copies, carrying the draughts and portraitures of Good, Virtue, Duty, Felicity; propounding them well described as the true objects and scopes of man's will and desires; but how to attain these excellent marks, and how to frame and subdue the will of man to become true and comformable to these pursuits, they pass it over altogether, or slightly and unprofitably.

In the second Book of The Advancement of Learning, Bacon pointed again and again to the failure of moral philosophy. Virtue was known but how to be virtuous was not; or, at most, men had made the question a topic of conversation but not of scholarship. Of the determinants of men's behaviour two areas—nature and fortune—were beyond our command. It was necessary, if ever a science of moral philosophy were to be developed, for the distinctions of nature and fortune to be listed and examined in effects. The ancients had made observations of this type 'and yet nevertheless this kind of observations wandereth in words but is not fixed in inquiry. For the distinctions are found (many of them), but we conclude no precepts upon them … 'There remained a third area of investigation: 'those points which are within our own command, and have force and operation upon the mind to affect the will and appetite and to alter manners: wherein they ought to have handled custom, exercise, habit, education, example, imitation, emulation, company, friends, praise, reproof, exhortation, fame, laws, books, studies'. Unfortunately Bacon restricted himself to a discussion of custom and habit, and this was merely a brief survey of a few commonplace precepts. There was, however,

a kind of Culture of the Mind that seemeth yet more accurate and elaborate than the rest, and is built upon this ground; that the minds of all men are at some times in a state more perfect, and at other times in a state more depraved. The purpose therefore of this practice is to fix and cherish the good hours of the mind and to obliterated and take forth the evil.

He concluded, somewhat lamely, that the best means towards this end were 'the electing and propounding unto a man's self good and virtuous ends of his life, such as may be in a reasonable sort within his compass to attain'. Finally, when it came to civil knowledge, Bacon declared that a knowledge of the means of moving men to conscientious behaviour was quite unnecessary: 'moral philosophy propoundeth to itself the framing of internal goodness; but civil knowledge requireth only an external goodness'. The sum of civil behaviour was 'to retain a man's own dignity without intruding upon the liberty of others'. For the rest, Bacon concerned himself with the means to individual success and promised to treat government and law in a collection of aphorisms. Like much of his work, his discussion here of moral philosophy and civil knowledge was more valuable as criticism than for any positive contribution. He did little to make up for the neglect he found in others.

The nearest Bacon came to a systematic discussion of the means whereby the will of man might be moved and moulded was in a work on quite another topic. A Letter and Discourse to Sir Henry Savill, Touching Helps for the Intellectual Powers was written early in Bacon's career. In it, Bacon was concerned to show how capable of improvement the mental faculties of men were. His argument was that, of all creatures, man was 'the most susceptible of help, improvement, impression and alteration', and that, as this was true of his body, appetite and affection so it held good also of his power of wit and reason. Thus his discussion of the means of influencing the will of man was a mere preliminary to demonstrating how his intellectual, as opposed to moral, capacities might be improved. 'And as to the will of man', he wrote, 'it is that which is most maniable and obedient; as that which admitteth most medecines to cure and alter it.' The premier of these was religion; the 'most sovereign of all', 'able to change and transform it in the deepest most inward inclinations and motions'. (This was, of course, a priority reflected in the insistence on Christian faith as a precondition of entry to New Atlantis.) Next came 'Opinion and Apprehension; whether it be infused by tradition and institution, or wrought in by disputation and persuasion'. Third, was example; fourth, 'when one affection is healed and corrected by another; as when cowardice is remedied by shame and dishonour, or sluggishness and backwardness by indignation and emulation; and so of the like'. Lastly, 'when all these means, or any of them, have new framed or formed human will, then doth custom and habit corroborate and confirm all the rest'. These 'medicines' produced two kinds of cure: a true cure and a 'palliation'. The latter was 'more plentiful in the courts of princes, and in all politic traffic, where it is ordinary to find not only profound dissimulations and suffocating the affections that no note or mark appear of them outwardly, but also lively simulations and affectations, carrying the tokens of passions which are not'.

What is revealing about this is that, even here, Bacon does not see the state, its legal and institutional apparatus, as a means of influencing and changing conduct on a mass basis. Moulding the wills of men remained a question of individual influence, individual decision and individual will rather than collective influence, collective decision and collective will. The question then arises why, with these views as basic, Bacon's ideal society was not a straightforward perfect moral commonwealth. The answer lies, perhaps, in Bacon's profound pessimism about man—a pessimism which left him, as we have seen, with a nervous hesitation over the invulnerability of his moral supermen, the Fellows of Salomon's House. Men were imbued with a 'natural though corrupt' love of lies. Their rulers were corrupt, their treaties acts of deceit. The people were a brute rabble, 'always swelling with malice towards their rulers, and hatching revolutions'. 'There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise; and therefore those faculties by which the foolish part of men's minds is taken are most potent.' Holiness of life so far exceeded the strength of human nature that it had to be regarded as a miracle. Paradoxically, for a defender of learning and the contemplative life, Bacon held a deeply pessimistic view of the human mind and senses. In the Novum Organon he referred to the 'dulness, incompetency and deceptions of the senses'. Elsewhere, he found the mind of man 'far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced'. It was against the shortcomings of the mind that Bacon warned men in histheory of the Idols of the Mind. When these were added to the 'incapacity of the mind and the vanity and malignity of the affections', nothing was left but 'impotency and confusion'. Consequently, the mind could not be left to itself but had to operate under the continuous guidance of method. Only induction, sieved through exclusions, could lead man out of the darkness of his mind into the light of nature.

This pessimistic view of the nature and mind of man was instrumental in preventing Bacon from visualising a perfect moral commonwealth. More than this, it nourished a basic political conservatism which inhibited him from committing himself to any form of ideal society. In so far as Bacon applied his system of induction to the kingdom of politics and law, as well as to the kingdom of nature, he was bound to end up a moderate conservative. Hence his approach to ecclesiastical affairs was essentially that of a politique. He could see good and bad in both bishops and puritans. No system of church government was divinely ordained. Altering the established system could only be dangerous. Similarly, as he repeatedly said, he sought no innovation in English law but merely 'the better to establish and settle a certain sense of law which doth now too much waver in incertainty'. In his great essay, "Of Innovations", Bacon put forward a credo prefiguring the moderate conservatism of Edmund Burke. Innovations, he argued, are always misshapen but time itself is an innovator. It is necessary, therefore, for man to innovate according to time's pattern. 'It were good therefore that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself; which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly and in degrees scarce to be perceived.' In states experiments should be avoided, 'except the necessity be urgent, or the utility be evident'.

The conservative view of politics, the pragmatic attitude to change, are amongst the most consistent features of Bacon's thought. Elsewhere, he is hesitant, uncertain, ambivalent. He occupied a 'curiously anomalous position as a herald of the new scientific age who is also an incorrigible addict of modes of thinking which his expressed programme would replace: allegory, myth, iconographical symbolism, alchemy'. He was optimistic about the future of learning while retaining a pessimistic view of man's capacities as learner. His view of history hovered uncertainly between his inductive approach to history as a branch of knowledge, his dalliance with conventional cyclical theories, and his concern with history as the fall of man and the recovery in which his scientific method was to be instrumental. That Bacon was frequently lacking in precision of thought can hardly be gainsaid. It was almost a part of his intellectual milieu. But the problem goes deeper than this. Bacon, as Anne Righter [in "Francis Bacon," 1968] has argued, was caught in a dilemma 'between the desire for truth and the distrust of certainty, the need to generalize and abridge and the fear of violating the individuality of facts'. He was the victim of a double impulse, 'a need to discover and establish truth on the one hand, and to prevent thought from settling and assuming a fixed form on the other'. In a similar way, he acknowledged, but could never accept, the separation of the ideal and the actual.

Bacon's scientific certainty, his optimistic faith in a method capable of coping with man's fallibility, led him to visualise a society exploiting those methods. But when it came to idealising that society in other respects he was caught in a dilemma. Possessed of the pessimism about man of the utopian and the pessimism about institutional innovation of the perfect moral commonwealth theorist, he was caught in the tentacles of his own conservatism and could not commit himself to either view of a society purged, changed and perfected.

Bacon wished to visualise an ideal society in which science was esteemed, scientists were of crucial importance and scientific results were effectively harnessed for social benefit. In the New Atlantis he tried to adapt the mode of Sir Thomas More to this purpose and found himself trapped. For, in choosing the utopian mode, he was committing himself to the assumption of deficiencies in both man and nature. The latter, deficiencies in nature, were acceptable because science existed to remedy them. Indeed there would be no science in arcadia. The central problem lay in the utopian's assumption of human weakness and wickedness, for this meant that Bacon must assume the fallibility and corruptibility of his scientists. It followed therefore that, to prevent them from using their power to disorder society, he must restrain and control them and in so doing he risked destroying scientific freedom and with it the basis of the ideality of his society. Trapped in the exigencies of the utopian mode, Bacon exposes at once the problem and the impossibility of a scientific utopia. If science is to progress to the achieving of all things possible, minds, and to some extent actions, must be free of censorship and control. But scientific knowledge is power. It can, as Bacon knew, alter the material conditions of society and hence the structure of society itself. If we trust the scientist not only to pursue knowledge but to exercise his resultant power over society in a benevolent and enlightened way, then why may we not trust all men, particularly those not exposed to the temptations of scientific power? Why may we not, in other words, visualise a scientific perfect moral commonwealth? If, like the utopian, we cannot trust human nature, in scientists as well as others, how are we to have control without inhibiting freedom of enquiry? Bacon's failure to complete an ideal-society vision—his inability to assume either the automatic integrity of the scientist or to accept the stifling of free enquiry—is a great failure because it raises these still-unresolved issues at the moment of the conception of modern science.

Like More in Book I of the Utopia, Bacon faced the problem of the extent to which one is obliged to share true knowledge with those in power. More's problem here was solved in a perfect society because the knowledge he emphasised was moral knowledge which could be made consistent with, if it were not essential to, a stable and unchanging society. But Bacon's problem was not solved there because the knowledge he gave primacy to was technological knowledge. Behind it lay unanswered moral questions. Within it lay a capacity to produce instability and unknown social change.