Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
its sacred moorings and reattached to secular ones, its thematic substance
will nevertheless abide because that substance has been impressed into the
narrative form. In our case this means that the seemingly secular visions of
scientific history that began to manifest in the Enlightenment (though then
still consciously credited to Bacon) continued to employ a millenarian form
like the one I have just described in Bacon's
New Atlantis
. Because form
is a conveyor of theme (being consubstantial with theme in some sense),
such secular imitations of Bacon's scientific history brought over from it the
thematic substance of “providence”—albeit now under the heading of the
different term “progress.”
Although Charles Whitney has applied the concept of displacement to
Bacon's messages themselves (with insightful effect), my interpretation is
that this kind of literary expression is only anticipated in his messages—in
Bacon's case, this is biblical recursion but not yet displacement.
13
For seven-
teenth-century readers, at least, the biblical narrative would have remained
fully present in Bacon's applications. However, the novelty of his interpreta-
tions of the biblical narrative represents a step in this direction, and this
accounts for the odd fact that he could so easily become as much a hero
for eighteenth-century skeptics as he had been for the Puritan intellectuals
of his own century. His
New Atlantis
in particular foreshadows the more
genuine displacement of the next century to the extent that, as an exercise
of literary imagination, it had already loosened its traditional Christian ele-
ments from the realm of real history by setting them in a fictional one.
Bacon's exercise of imagination in his
New Atlantis
anticipates the for-
getfulness that genuine displacement fosters. In part we can understand
why this would be by considering what Bacon himself had to say about the
rhetorical role of imagination. Every student of rhetoric is familiar with
Bacon's belief that reason could win out in persuasive communication only
if it also operated upon the auditor's imagination in appropriate ways. Rea-
son would become “captive and servile,” he argued in his
Advancement of
Learning
, “if Eloquence of Persuasions did not practice and win the Imagi-
nation from the Affections's part, and contract a confederacy between the
Reason and Imagination against the Affections.”
14
As applied to history,
this was necessary because, while “reason beholdeth the future and sum
of time,” human emotions, which “beholdeth merely the present,” obscure
the better future that reason might win. Thus it was the office of rhetoric
to encourage a “revolt of the imagination” against the emotional ties that
bind readers to present experience so as to make “things future and remote
appear as present.”
15
