New Atlantis
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Published posthumously in 1627, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is an unfinished philosophical fiction imagining an ideal society on the remote island of Bensalem. A group of European sailors arrives there after a difficult voyage and discovers a community whose customs, institutions and remarkable prosperity are organised around the pursuit of knowledge. At the heart of this society stands Salomon’s House, a learned institution devoted to the systematic investigation of nature and the advancement of human welfare.
Combining the traditions of utopian literature and speculative travel writing, Bacon presents an ambitious vision of scientific inquiry as a collective undertaking serving the public good. The island’s carefully ordered society also raises questions about secrecy, authority, religion and the relationship between knowledge and power. Though incomplete, New Atlantis became an influential imaginative expression of Bacon’s reforming ambitions and is often associated with the intellectual culture that would later give rise to organised scientific societies, including the Royal Society.
From the book
“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.”
— Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
On New Atlantis
“The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things.”
— Francis Bacon, New Atlantis