Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Imagination thus employed also served the interests of prophecy by
enabling auditors to see “more according to revealed providence,” which
was constantly obscured by the effects of human sinfulness in real his-
tor y.
16
Since providence could only be imperfectly shown in real experience,
Bacon judged that “feigned histories” better satisfy the “mind of man” by
constructing “acts and events greater and more heroical” than what “true
history propoundeth.” Prophetic reason unassisted by imagination “doth
buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things,” but poetic imagi-
nation brings together “magnanimity, morality and . . . delectation.” This
explained why imagination was in ancient times “ever thought to have some
participation of divineness” by virtue of its capacity to “raise and erect the
mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind.”
17
Here we find an explanation for Bacon's attraction to fable and, more
importantly, an object lesson that anticipates how the persuasive scope of
prophecy won by its exercise would be further extended once it was dis-
placed by the secular authors of later generations. By imagining such pure
operations of providence in the fictional history of Bensalem, Bacon could
envision what Christendom might have looked like had it never wandered
from the path of true faith. As one might expect, the perfected church of
Bacon's imagining looks a lot like the Protestant Christianity of his con-
temporaries, and this is precisely what also makes Bensalem's scientific
preoccupations so compelling. By also writing science into this reimagined
Christian history, Bacon made it that much easier to imagine a Protestant
future dominated by science. But what would happen if subsequent imi-
tations of this imaginary excursion further distanced it from its biblical
model? I will suggest that the more genuine displacement that eventually
gave rise to evolutionism represents an extension of this imaginative prin-
ciple. In the secular milieu, Bacon's narrative was pushed to the breaking
point of forgetfulness. The religious bases of this story were destined to be
forgotten, but its religious meaning would endure through the conveyance
of its form.
In the cultural evolutionary terms that I laid out at the onset of this
project, we might say that Bacon is a transitional figure. When Robert
Faulkner describes Bacon's
New Atlantis
as “conversion poetry,” he makes
note of the ways in which this message points back to the sacred source
from which the historical consciousness of science comes but also forward
toward its secularization. Bacon wrote science into a traditional notion of
Christian history as an instance of conversion or reform, a new beginning,
but he adapted it for secular use by doing so through poetry, by exercising
