[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1952, Morton relates the Utopian ideas of the New Atlantis to political issues occasioned by the rise of the bourgeoisie.]

Ireton: All the main thing that I speak for, is because I would have an eye to property. I hope we do not come here to contend for victory—but let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kingdom, which if you take away, you take away all by that….

Rainborough: Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away. If it be laid down for a rule, and you will say it, it must be so. But I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches.

Debate of the General Council of the Army.
Putney, October 29th, 1647.

At no other time is there such a wealth of Utopian speculation in England as in the seventeenth century. And at no time is this speculation at once so bold and practical and so dry and narrow. In this age of revolution Utopia comes closest to immediate politics and the every day problems of government, and in doing so it loses as well as gains. More, as we have seen, was concerned with the relation of wealth and poverty, with the abolition of classes, and, ultimately, with the questions of human happiness and social justice. The typical Utopian writers of the seventeenth century are concerned with political questions in the narrow sense, with the framing of a model constitution and with its working machinery, with the formation and character of governments and the perfection of parliamentary representation. They are concerned, in short, not so much with justice as with power.

As a result, there is a complete change in temper and style. We find nothing to correspond to More's breadth of vision, his pity and anger, his doubts and the wry humour with which these doubts are expressed. Everything now is dry, precise and lawyerlike. There is a cool confidence, a bright, hard certainty that here, in Macaria or Oceana, is the one true light, that here is a practical programme that need only be adopted to carry the revolution to its full perfection. And, to a very large extent, this confidence was justified, for the problem which had baffled and tormented More had been solved, the bourgeoisie had won power, had the means of making their desires effective. Hence, as this chapter will try to show, there was a close relationship between the Utopian writings and the active framing of constitutions which went on throughout the Commonwealth period.

This change in the climate of Utopia corresponds exactly to the change in the English political climate. We have seen something of the beginnings of the development of capitalism; of the growth and decline of classes, the transfer of wealth and the peculiar relations which existed between the bourgeoisie and the House of Tudor. The Tudor absolutism gave the men of the new wealth the necessary shelter and breathing space in which to grow strong: ample advantage was taken of this opportunity, till, by the end of the century, the protection had ceased to be a necessity and the protector had become a burden. In alliance with the crown the bourgeoisie had decimated the peasantry, humbled the church, crushed Spain, traversed oceans and explored new continents. Now, appearing for the first time in history as an independent force, they attacked the monarchy itself, deposed and beheaded a king and established a republic. For a brief space Utopia ceased to be a fiction but was felt by thousands to be just round the corner. If there were any limits to the power of this brave new class, they were not immediately apparent.

Before the confident morning of the revolution there was a rather bleak dawn period, the generation in which the alliance between crown and bourgeoisie was breaking, when the tension of events created bewilderment, weariness and disillusion. It was the period of Shakespeare's tragedies, the age when the bounding extravagance of Tamburlaine had given place to the extravagant psychological horrors of Webster. To this period belongs Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and in the history of the English Utopia Bacon is the link connecting More with the Utopian writers of the revolutionary period.

Like More, Bacon was a member of a family which was prominent in the service of the crown, was trained as a lawyer but combined the profession of law with a continuing passion for philosophy, became Lord Chancellor of England, and, at the height of his fortune, was disgraced and driven from office. Here, however, the parallel ends, for few men have ever been more dissimilar in their interests or character. There is perhaps no great English writer whose personality is less attractive than Bacon's, and all the elaborate apologias of his many admirers and the power and magnificence of his prose only increase the distaste we feel in the presence of the man. Never was such a subtle and splendid intellect employed to serve meaner or more trivial ends, and neither pride nor gratitude nor loyalty to friends were allowed to brake his climb to wealth and influence. Grasping timidity and profuse display seemed continually to deny the austere impersonality of the philosopher's creed.

Yet this is only a part of the truth about Bacon: it would be quite wrong, I believe, to imagine that the philosophy was not both sincere and profoundly felt. Partly, it may be, the very subtlety of the intellect deceived itself, but more than that, Bacon's character expresses in a new form the essential contradiction within Humanism, the contradiction that lies at the very heart of the bourgeois revolution. Humanism fought to liberate mankind from superstition and ignorance, but also to liberate capitalist production from the restraints of feudal economy: the bourgeois revolution was waged for the ultimate advantage of mankind as a whole but also to secure for a new exploiting class power to rob and to become rich, and in this revolution meanness and nobility, cruel oppression and generosity are inextricably tangled. The pursuit of truth and the pursuit of wealth often seemed the same thing, and whatever Bacon's faults may have been, about the pursuit of truth he was always passionately in earnest.

And truth for Bacon meant power, not indeed political power, since he was a loyal servant of the crown and well content with the existing order, but power over nature through the understanding of natural law. This is the core of all his work, and not least of the New Atlantis, which, under cover of describing a utopian commonwealth is really a prospectus for a state-endowed college of experimental science. It was the work of his old age, written when, over sixty, he was dismissed and ruined, but still hoping against all reason that he might be restored to power. It was a fragment only, begun and laid aside unfinished, and never published in his life-time. He began it in the hope that James I would adopt and subsidise his proposals: its incomplete state is the proof of the final abandonment of his hopes, and therefore of his interest in the work, since that interest was confined solely to its possible practical outcome.

Bacon, unlike More, was not concerned with social justice. He, too, was a Humanist, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century Humanism had run cold: the difference between Utopia and New Atlantis is not so much a difference of content as a difference of purpose, a shift of interest and a lowering of temperature. The earlier Humanists believed in reason and in the possibility of the attainment of happiness by the unfettered exercise of reason. Bacon and his contemporaries, while not denying the power of reason had gradually shifted the weight of emphasis away from reason to experiment. As Bacon wrote:

Our method is continually to dwell among things soberly … to establish for ever a true and legitimate union between the experimental and rational faculty.

And elsewhere:

For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh its web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of the thread and work, but of no substance or profit.

Bacon stood at the beginning of the first period of materialism, in which it was confidently believed that the whole universe, from the solar system to the mind of man, was a vast and complex machine and could be mastered absolutely by a sufficient understanding of the laws of mechanics. He saw it as his task to use his prestige and his incomparable control over language to urge upon his contemporaries the undertaking of this final assault upon the mysteries of nature. As Basil Willey says in his admirable book, The Seventeenth Century Background:

Bacon's rôle was to indicate with fine magniloquence the path by which alone 'science' could advance. This he did, while other men, such as Galileo, Harvey or Gilbert, in whom he took comparatively little interest, were achieving great discoveries on the principles which he taught. Bacon's great service to 'science' was that he gave it an incomparable advertisement.

The information which we are given about the social and economic and political organisation of Bensalem, the Utopian island of New Atlantis, is naturally, therefore, meagre and indirect, since Bacon only intends the fiction to provide an interesting background for the pamphlet. But one cannot but be struck with the remarkable decline from the standpoint reached in Utopia, and, since Bacon had obviously read More's book, this may be taken as an implied criticism in the points where they differ. Bensalem is a monarchy of an orthodox type, with the inevitable fixed constitution handeddown from the founder-king Salomona. It has private property and classes, as we have to infer from a passage which says that on certain ceremonial occasions.

if any of the family be distressed or decayed, order is taken for their relief, and competent means to live.

That is to say, that while the necessities of the poor are provided for, this is done as a charity and not as of right, and the need for such charity appears normally to arise. Correspondingly there are marked social gradations and inequalities, and the officials and leading citizens are distinguished by magnificent clothes and lavish display and have numbers of personal servants. There is a strongly patriarchal family, quite unmarked by any trace of the communism with which More tempered family life, and great power is enjoyed by the heads of these families and by the old generally.

Chance voyagers, like the narrator of the story, were welcomed in Bensalem and received hospitably, but intercourse with foreign lands was discouraged because King Salomona,

recalling into his memory the happy and flourishing estate wherein his land then was, so as it might be a thousand ways altered to the worse, but scarce any one way to the better; thought nothing wanted to his noble and heroical intentions, but only, as far as human foresight might reach, to give perpetuity to that which was in his time so happily established; therefore … he did ordain the interdicts and prohibitions which we have touching the entrance of strangers.

At the same time, as was fitting for a people given up to the search for knowledge, every effort was made to discover and import all that was known in other lands, and with this object secret missions were sent out at regular intervals to visit all civilised lands and bring back reports.

To Salomona, also, was credited the establishment of Salomon's (or Solomon's) House, whose 'fellows' were the object almost of veneration among the Bensalemites. Here we come to Bacon's real point: New Atlantis, like Bensalem itself, exists only for the sake of it. And in nothing more than in his ideas about education does Bacon differ from More. For More, as we have seen, education was a social and co-operative pursuit, with its object the increasing of the happiness and the enrichment of the personalities of the whole people: for Bacon it was the affair of a body of specialists, lavishly endowed by the state and carrying on their work in complete isolation from the masses (we are told that the visit of one of the fathers of Salomon's House to the capital city was the first for a dozen years). Its object was not happiness but power:

The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

There is a kind of holy simplicity in this unbounded belief in man's powers that is the most attractive side of Bacon and which makes him the truly representative man of his time, but this samesimplicity limits his objectives to the quantitative and the empirical. There is little in Bacon of the desire to pass beyond catalogue to synthesis, and he was a superb generaliser with a deep distrust of generalisation.

For this reason the methods of Salomon's House were purely experimental, and to the cataloguing of experiments Bacon devotes the ten happiest pages of New Atlantis, describing a great variety of metallurgical, biological, astronomical and chemical marvels, as well as the practical application of science to the making of new substances and fabrics, to medicine and even to engineering:

We imitate also the flights of birds: for we have some degree of flying in the air: we have ships and boats for going under water…. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also the motions of living things by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes and serpents.

Bacon hoped to interest King James, who prided himself upon his virtuosity and delighted to be called the modern Solomon, in his scheme, and, no doubt, dreamed that the foundation of such a college of science might lead to his return to public life and favour. In this he was disappointed, for James had little interest in science for its own sake and already the political struggle was curtailing the resources of the crown. It was not till 1645, under the rule of the Long Parliament, that Bacon's scheme assumed a modest practical form as the "College of Philosophy". Its founders, Samuel Hartlib, author of the Utopian essay Macaria, and the Czech scholar Comenius, both admitted that their scheme was inspired by New Atlantis. Similarly, when the College of Philosophy developed into the Royal Society in 1662, Sprat, Boyle, Glanville and others declared that this was only the carrying into effect of Bacon's outline of Salomon's House. Later still, it was among the main influences which determined the form to be taken by the work of the French Encyclopedists. Diderot, in the Prospectus, stated specifically:

If we have come at it successfully, we shall owe most to the Chancellor Bacon, who threw out the plan of an universal dictionary of sciences and arts, at a time when, so to say, neither arts nor sciences existed. That extraordinary genius, when it was impossible to write a history of what was known, wrote one of what it was necessary to learn.

New Atlantis, therefore, belongs to the history of science as much as to the history of Utopia or to the history of politics. Nevertheless, the development of science and industrial technique was an essential part of the advance of the bourgeoisie, and, as I have said, Bacon's preoccupation with applied science as a form of power links him with the extremely political Utopi an writers of the Commonwealth….