Rereadings: Sir Francis Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis,’ an eden for scientists

Sir Francis Bacon was known as a moral philosopher, a description that earlier in my life was enough to frighten me into not reading him. I later became acquainted with him because of the manner of his death, from a chill brought on by his attempt to investigate the preserving qualities of ice on a freshly killed chicken, an incident I recounted in a book about the cold. He died in 1626 and “New Atlantis” was published the following year. Even shorter than Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” it too has had a decided effect on the world.Unlike More’s “Utopia,” “New Atlantis” is a quick and fascinating read. The crux of the argument is contained in a few pages, but in the build-up to them Bacon takes witty potshots, for instance at More for some of the sillier notions in “Utopia,” at the absurdity of European society in putting marriage on a pedestal but encouraging bawdy houses and drunkenness that undermine marriage, and at Plato for his exaltation of the perfect state, Atlantis, only after it had sunk into the ocean.In Bacon’s earlier and longer book, “The Great Instauration,” he invited rational people to no longer rely for their perceptions of the world on the constructs of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and to discover on their own how the world around them worked. “New Atlantis” took that idea to its logical end, a kingdom energized by science and scientists. The book’s narrator recounts how he and a group of explorers sailed west from Peru, and, six weeks on, starving and ailing, happened on an unknown continent. Not permitted to land, they were given a note in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Spanish, and bearing the sign of the cross. Soon, because the visitors gave no evidence of piracy, they were allowed ashore to recuperate. In a “Strangers House,” many of the sick were cured, the visitors enjoyed marvelous food and drink, and eventually had their curiosity about the kingdom and its people satisfied by lectures from the sages. The islanders were descended from a group that had fled west within a few years of the death of Christ. They developed their uniqueness by clinging to their descent from Jews. They were at peace, and had plenty of liberty, bodily contentment, variety in life, and intellectual and sensual stimulation. Every dozen years they sent spies into the world to collect books and mechanical devices, and bring them home for study and reverse engineering.“Salomon’s House” was a foundation, the country’s most prestigious, devoted to scientific experiment, and over the course of a thousand years had produced marvelous medicine, fantastic animal and plant husbandry, useful complex machines, and was attempting the perfection of man in various ways, including what we would today call genetic manipulation. The surrounding countryside also contained some products of the research — structures six levels under the ground and as high above it as half a mile, artificial lagoons, weather-manipulation devices, disease-curing facilities and kitchens serving newly created food dishes. The researchers were continually engaged in pushing the limits of knowledge to determine, e.g., how birds fly or why chemicals react. The purpose? “The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, as to the effecting of all things possible.” Prior to “New Atlantis,” science had been an individual exercise, with wealthy men investigating phenomena and having minimal contact with other investigators in the next town or next country. Bacon’s “New Atlantis” was adopted as a manifesto, first in the 1640s in the “invisible college,” and in 1660 to found the Royal Society of London, the world’s first scientific association, devoted to learning through experiment, peer review, and publication of methods and results — “Salomon’s House,” come to London. The Royal Society’s first journal was couched in Baconian terms: “Philosophical Transactions Giving Some Account of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World.” The Royal Society also encouraged the work of Isaac Newton. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson — who aspired to being a scientist — hung in his study at Monticello portraits of what he called his “trinity” of the greatest men ever: Newton, John Locke and Bacon. It was not only scientific research that they inspired; Jefferson saw them, and the canons of Baconian science, as the wellspring of a wider democracy of spirit and governance. Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.