Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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The potency of this speculative freedom is perhaps borne out by the fact that
New Atlantis
, though a work of fiction, came to be closely associated with
science's most significant institutional achievement in the seventeenth cen-
tury—the establishment of the Royal Society of London. Salomon's House,
the scientific college that dominates the imaginary Christian civilization of
this tale, was destined to become, as the clergyman and philosopher Joseph
Glanvill (1636-1680) declared in his
Scepsis Scientifica
(1665), “a Prophetick
Scheam of the ROYAL SOCIETY.”
6
A decade earlier Samuel Hartlib had
said that the similar institute he had hoped to establish at Lambeth Marsh
had likewise been “designed for the execution of my Lord Verulam's
New
Atlantis.
”
7
The story's influence in linking the new natural philosophy with
the prophetic fervor of this age may likewise be measured by the extraor-
dinary popularity it enjoyed during this period. Written in 1624 and pub-
lished posthumously in 1627 along with Bacon's
Sylva Sylvarum
, a treatise on
natural history, his
New Atlantis
would appear in seventeen editions before
the century was out.
8
This “fable,” as Bacon's secretary and chaplain William Rawley called
it, has features that may reflect some debt to Plato and to the utopian tale
of one earlier Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, just as its setting on an
island in the South Pacific marks the influence of those fashionable tales
of exploration and new-world adventure then being circulated by Hakluyt,
Raleigh, and Harriot.
9
But its explicit use of Old Testament types also made
it a work of millenarian prophecy. By giving a dramatic form to the theologi-
cal reasoning elsewhere outlined in Bacon's works of scientific advocacy, it
anchored what it imagined in providential history. This enabled his audi-
tors to visualize a partnership between science and religion that brought
scientific work into concert with that of the church, thereby making it an
expression of that same obedience to revelation by which, in the reformers'
view, a once prodigal flock was now turning back to Christ.
Bacon's contribution to what we would now call science fiction is a mari-
ner's story about a ship blown off its course in the South Pacific, somewhere
out beyond the shores of Peru. Having exhausted the provisions meant to
sustain their journey to China and Japan, the mariners find themselves lost
“in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world.”
10
They are
saved, however, when an unexpected wind carries them northward to the
previously undiscovered island of Bensalem. Here, as we are told by the
voyager who narrates the tale, they are greeted by an entourage of officials
