¹ It is worth noting, as others have, that Bacon did so not only in his writings, but that he spoke in favor of policies to encourage scientific-technological innovation while in Parliament and throughout his public life (Farrington, Benjamin, Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science [New York: Schuman, 1949], 48Google Scholar). Jardine, Lisa and Stewart, Alan cite the same speech, but with a view to a separate point in Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561–1628 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 256–57Google Scholar. See also the general remarks of Rahe, Paul in Republics Ancient and Modern: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 116Google Scholar.

² Aristotle Politics 1267b23–1269a26; cf. 1330b31–1331a6. Consider also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II q. 97 a. 2 and the discussion of Archimedes in Plutarch's “Life of Marcellus.” Of course, this is not to claim that the full transformative potential of the institutionalization of a technological science was known in advance. I am aware that there are some prominent and powerful arguments suggesting that modern technology has roots that precede Bacon, but I believe that on the matter of the political encouragement of technological innovation, pre-Baconian thought is virtually univocal. Be this as it may, reconsidering Bacon's arguments provides an occasion for reflection on the fundamental problem.

³ The clearest statement to this effect is found in his rendition and interpretation of the fable of Daedalus in De Sapientia Veterum. For a forceful statement of the importance of this writing and a helpful interpretation see Studer, Heidi, “Francis Bacon on the Political Dangers of Scientific Progress,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 31, no. 2 (1998): 219–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Consider also the essay “Of Innovations” and Novum Organum, I. 129.

⁴ Compare the essay “Of Honour and Reputation” and Nov. Org., I. 129. This tension is discussed further below.

⁵ Peltonen, Markku, “Politics and Science: Francis Bacon and the True Greatness of States,” The Historical Journal 35, no. 2 (1992): 279–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Bacon's Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 283–310.

⁶ The Advancement of Learning, II. viii. 5. Citations to The Advancement are to book, chapter, and paragraph, following the W. A. Wright edition of 1869 (Oxford: Clarendon), and the Kitchin and Weinberger edition of 2001 (Philadelphia: Paul Dry).

⁷ While in most of Bacon's works there is no doubt but that he is the speaker, Bacon is also a great writer of prefaces and dedicatory epistles. In these he virtually always speaks of himself, and gives some indication, if only elliptically, of what the aim of the work in question is. Examples worth considering in this regard include the prefatory material to Instauratio magna, the epistle introducing The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, that introducing An Advertisement Touching a Holy War, those introducing De Sapientia Veterum, and finally, those introducing the two books of The Advancement of Learning. For an indication that Bacon gives some thought both to the content and the addressee of these epistles, that which introduces The Essays should be consulted. Bacon's silence in New Atlantis thus stands out all the more. This cannot be explained simply by the posthumous publication of the work, for the evidence is clear that Bacon intended the work to appear as it does, and An Advertisement Touching a Holy War, also posthumous, is introduced by a substantial dedicatory epistle. The status of Rawley's note to the reader is discussed below.

⁸ “From a strictly literary viewpoint, New Atlantis resembles a narrated Platonic dialogue” (Yaffe, Martin, Shylock and the Jewish Question [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 97Google Scholar). Compare, by way of contrast, More's role in Utopia. In his otherwise intelligent essay, David Spitz treats the narrator as Bacon (“Bacon's New Atlantis: A Reinterpretation,” Midwest Journal of Political Science 4, no. 1 [1960]: 52–61). Interpreters occasionally identify Bacon with the pity-faced Father of Salomon's House. Manuel, Frank and Manuel, Fritzie speak of the scientist as “Bacon's idealized self-image” (Utopian Thought in the Western World [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979], 254)Google Scholar.

⁹ Again, compare More's “authorship” of Utopia. If only in jest, More goes to much greater lengths than does Bacon in protesting the truth of what he reports. Perhaps this is some indication of a difference in the status that the description of Utopia has for More as compared to Bacon's relation to Bensalem.

¹⁰ This occurs in the course of the discussion of the Bensalemite institution of “Adam and Eve's pools,” which bears a certain similarity to an institution encountered by Hythloday in Utopia. As is typical, the Morean precedent is invoked only to be importantly modified.

¹¹ See the Oxford English Dictionary entries for “utopia” and “utopian,” and the introduction to Manuel and Manuel's Utopian Thought. The question of when “utopia” becomes a genre is controversial. Diskin Clay and Andrea Purvis offer what is perhaps the standard view that More's Utopia was the origin of the genre (Four Island Utopias [Newburyport: Focus, 1999], 1). Paul Salzman suggests that New Atlantis plays a key role in originating the genre (“Narrative Contexts for Bacon's New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon's “New Atlantis”: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price [New York: Manchester University Press, 2002], 30). Machiavelli's reference to the “many” “imaginary commonwealths” suggests that something like a genre is well established before either of these works. See below.

¹² Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 126.

¹³ The Advancement of Learning, II. xxiii. 49. Of course, little light is not no light. Consider in this connection the methodological advice from The Advancement, II. xxiii. 44. Prior to the discovery of the compass, one navigated by the stars; more about this below. Michèle Le Doeuff would have us notice how this remark is quietly altered in De Augmentis (VIII. 3), and suggests that this is an indication that Bacon's view on this matter of utopias underwent a change (“Introduction” to La Nouvelle Atlantide, trans. Michèle Le Doeuff and Margaret Llasera [Paris: Flammarion, 2000], 21). I am less impressed by the alteration than is Le Doeuff, though I am open to her suggestion that New Atlantis is on Bacon's mind while he is reworking The Advancement (according to Spedding, after 1620, and probably sometime in 1622: Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, The Works of Francis Bacon [Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1861], 1:415).

¹⁴ II. xxi. 9.

¹⁵ The Prince, trans. and ed. Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chap. 15.

¹⁶ Quoting Rawley's note to the reader. We discuss that note further below.

¹⁷ Farrington is famous for regarding Bacon's entire corpus as a “blueprint for a new world” (Francis Bacon, 76), though he doesn't mention the paradox in question. Works that do include it are White, Howard, Peace Among the Willows (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 133–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennington, Richard, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli,” in On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Kraus, Pamela and Hunt, Frank (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004), 57–77Google Scholar; Faulkner, Robert, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993)Google Scholar, chap. 3 and 239ff.; Timothy Paterson, “The Politics of Baconian Science” (PhD dissertation, Yale, 1982), 86–87. Relying on different passages, Marina Leslie calls attention to the same paradox (Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998], 81ff.).

¹⁸ Faulkner, Project of Progress, 238; Sessions, William, Francis Bacon Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), 163Google Scholar.

¹⁹ The edition including Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis was reprinted more often in the seventeenth century than any other edition of Bacon's works. Bronwen Price includes this observation as part of a very clear and sensible treatment of the influence of New Atlantis in her “Introduction” to New Interdisciplinary Essays (especially pages 14–19). Brian Vickers includes a succinct statement on the influence of New Atlantis in his collection of Bacon's, writings, Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 788–89Google Scholar. Rose-Mary Sargent concludes her essay “Bacon as an Advocate for Cooperative Scientific Research,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Peltonen, 146–171, with some remarks on the legacy of Salomon's House. The introduction to Lynch's, WilliamSolomon's Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar is helpful not only for its remarkable collection of secondary material but also on the general question of Bacon's influence. Sprat's, ThomasHistory of the Royal Society (1667)Google Scholar, which includes Abraham Cowley's prefatory poem likening Bacon to Moses leading the way to the promised land, and which divides all philosophy into pre- and post-Baconian periods, is among the important primary sources for Bacon's influence on English science. While now frequently criticized, the classic work on Bacon's influence on the seventeenth century is Jones's, Richard FosterAncients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965)Google Scholar, which includes many references to New Atlantis in connection with the founding of the Royal Society. Antonio Pérez-Ramos's “Bacon's Legacy,” in The Cambridge Companion, 311–334, provides something of a glimpse of the ostensibly more nuanced current scholarly view. Lynch's, William T. recent “A Society of Baconians?: The Collective Development of Bacon's Method in the Royal Society of London,” in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought, ed. Solomon, Julie Robin and Martin, Catherine Ginnelli (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005)Google Scholar, offers a reply. Caton's, HiramThe Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600–1835 (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1988)Google Scholar and Paul Rahe's Republics Ancient and Modern include sustained arguments for the historical significance of Bacon's writings both for modern science and modern politics.

²⁰ White (Peace Among the Willows, 105) treats each of these features of Bensalem simply as a device to encourage its implementation, but to do so is to say that such details both matter and yet don't matter.

²¹ II. i. 1. The discussion of poesy is found at II. iv. 1–5. See also Faulkner, Project of Progress, 236–37.

²² Within quotations, all underlining will be mine, all italics Bacon's.

²³ In De Augmentis (II.13), Bacon incorporates the general discussion of the uses of poetry sketched above into his account of narrative poetry.

²⁴ “And even now, if someone wishes to pour new light about anything into the minds of humans, and not incommodiously or harshly, the same way must be insisted upon, and refuge must be taken in the help of likenesses” (De Sapientia Veterum, Preface). Cf. Nov. Org., I. 77.

²⁵ The previous 12 chapters of De Augmentis.

²⁶ Note the echo of the full title of the work.

²⁷ This seems a fitting point to mention the efforts of D. W. Thompson and Robert Ralston Cawley in tracking possible sources of New Atlantis. Both authors suggest that Bacon crafted his travel tale on the model of certain actual voyages to the Pacific. Thompson's essay (“Japan and the New Atlantis,” Studies in Philology 30, no. 1 [1933]: 59–68) identifies a number of striking parallels between Bacon's tale and the open letters of a certain William Adams, “the first English resident in Japan.” Briefly, Adams left Europe in 1598, wintered in South America, and, heading for Japan, encountered contrary winds, eventually arrived, and, because of Japan's strict laws of secrecy, was forcibly kept there for a dozen years. In 1611 he sent a letter home detailing his travels and travails, and Thompson offers some grounds for supposing Bacon may have seen the letter. Cawley adds as a second or alternative source the voyage of de Quiros, Ferdinandez (Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940], 44–46)Google Scholar. Of course, such suggestions contribute little of real importance to our understanding of New Atlantis except insofar as they remind us of the form or genre of the work—that it is primarily and deliberately a feigned travel narrative. As White bluntly puts it, “It is but a shallow doctrine that holds that the long voyages of discovery and exploration explain the island utopias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Peace Among the Willows, 93). In his sustained consideration of the “genre” of New Atlantis, Paul Salzman references the findings of Cawley and Thompson as part of an argument that New Atlantis is both travelogue and utopia (Salzman, “Narrative Contexts,” 34–38). Salzman points out Bacon's use of the ‘matter-of-fact’ style of the typical travelogue. Vickers also notes “the work's hybrid nature” (Major Works, 785).

²⁸ White's chapter “Of Island Utopias” in Peace Among the Willows is a delightful and wide-ranging consideration of the whole complex of images and allusions associated with the discovery of distant islands. As his chapter title suggests, however, White takes the work as a utopia first, and a voyage of discovery second. My own treatment shares more with that of Michèle Le Doeuff, as well as the first parts of Timothy Reiss, “Seated Betwen the Old World and the New: Geopolitics, Natural Philosophy, and Proficient Method,” in Refiguring, ed. Solomon and Martin.

²⁹ “This work of the New Atlantis (as much as concerneth the English edition) his Lordship designed for this place” (New Atlantis and The Great Instauration, rev. edition, ed. Jerry Weinberger [Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1989], 36). Hereafter I will cite this edition by page number in the text.

³⁰ Clay and Purvis also comment on the frontispiece to the Instauratio magna in connection with Bensalem's location (Four Island Utopias, 48). In his excellent essay, “Bacon's New Atlantis: The Christian Hope and the Modern Hope” (Interpretation 22, no.1 [1996]: 3–37), David Innes identifies sailing as a metaphor for science (34n5; see also pages 6 and 7).

³¹ Farrington, Benjamin, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970), 110Google Scholar. This work contains translations of three unpublished works by Bacon. Hereafter, I will refer to this collection as PFB. See the similar remark in Nov. Org., I. 72 and the discussion of Columbus and Cabot in The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh.

³² PFB, 131. See also The Advancement, II. ii. 13.

³³ PFB, 109–10; Nov. Org., I. 72.

³⁴ PFB, 94; Nov. Org., I. 84.

³⁵ The Advancement, I. v. 2. Of course, in thus analogizing from historical examples, Bacon points out that and how these prejudices can be overcome.

³⁶ “I restrict myself, then, to the two, Plato and Aristotle; and be it said at once that anybody who does not place them among the greatest human minds has failed in understanding or in candour” (PFB, 111).

³⁷ The Great Instauration, Preface, paragraph 7; cf. PFB, 92.

³⁸ Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, I. Preface. Compare Nov. Org., I. 92: “And therefore it is fit that I publish and set forth those reasonable conjectures of mine which make hope in this matter reasonable, just as Columbus did, before that wonderful voyage of his across the Atlantic, when he gave the reasons for his conviction that new lands and continents might be discovered besides those which were known before; which reasons, though rejected at first, were afterwards made good by experience, and were the causes and beginnings of great events.” See also I. 114.

³⁹ PFB, 131; The Advancement, II. 2. 13.

⁴⁰ Cf. Aristotle Politics 1260b29, 1265a17, 1288b23, 1325b23–39, 1327a4, 1331b21; Plato Laws 688c.

⁴¹ Compare the note prefacing Sylva Sylvarum where it is asserted that that note would have been the same even had Bacon lived. This suggests that the same is not true of the note prefacing New Atlantis. Perhaps it is with similar considerations in mind that Vickers relegates Rawley's note to the endnotes of his collection of Bacon's works.

⁴² Especially compared with others of Bacon's apparently unfinished works. The status of the concluding phrase is unknown. I agree with Paterson, who says it “seems to have been” provided by Rawley, and that the subtitle is presumably Bacon's own (“The Politics,” 88). James Stephens seems to take this phrase as Bacon's own (Francis Bacon and the Style of Science [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975], 164).

⁴³ To be sure, the work ends with a request made but not yet fulfilled, but then the narration itself could be taken as the fulfillment of the request, if not necessarily the intention behind the request.

⁴⁴ Kennington, “Bacon's Humanitarian Revision,” 65.

⁴⁵ The treatment of this topic is very strong in Davis, J. C., Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 122–24Google Scholar. Sarah Hutton, “Persuasions to Science: Baconian Rhetoric and the New Atlantis,” in New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Price, 48–59, makes a case for incompleteness as part of an effective rhetorical strategy on Bacon's part. Without specifically mentioning New Atlantis, Ian Box, “Bacon's Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Peltonen, 261, makes a similar general claim about Bacon's use of the device of formal incompleteness. For a slightly different take on Bacon's “compulsion not to finish” see Whitney, Charles, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 189–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Spedding's introductory essay to New Atlantis (Spedding et al., Works of Francis Bacon, 5:349). Of course, the dating of New Atlantis has become a contentious scholarly debate. Bronwen Price asserts 1624 to be the general scholarly consensus in her “Introduction” to New Interdisciplinary Essays. No one argues that the work was composed later than 1624. The evidence cited by Davis all points to Bacon having considered a project akin to parts of New Atlantis (in particular, the outlining of “Salomon's House”) as early as 1594, though his stronger claims rest on Bacon's note from July 26, 1608. In this note Bacon refers to plans for a college of scientific research complete with galleries honoring inventors and their inventions, rewards for inventors, laws regulating publication and secrecy, provisions for traveling, and so forth. The note is quoted at length in Blodgett, Eleanor, “Bacon's New Atlantis and Campanella's Civitas Solis: A Study in Relationships,” PMLA 46, no. 3 (1931): 763–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and is found in Spedding et al., Works, 11:66. Of course, as Davis rightly points out, this evidence could only serve to bolster the arguments of those commentators skeptical of the incompleteness of New Atlantis: “Clearly, if the New Atlantis was subject to a process of revision it becomes impossible to explain away its inconsistencies, its unresolved problems, in terms of the author's haste or his unwillingness to put his work before an audience” (Utopia and the Ideal Society, 122).

⁴⁷ Rawley's Life of Bacon; see Weinberger, “Note on the text,” in New Atlantis, xxxv.

⁴⁸ As Sarah Hutton observes, “The typography of the first edition separates this section from the rest with a change of type-size” (“Persuasions to Science,” 52). This minor stylistic detail is, however, only the underscoring of the break in the text which comes to light within the narrative itself. The Father of Salomon's House licences and pays the narrator to publish the report he makes, that is, the description of the workings of Salomon's House. The remainder of the tale is thus the result of a decision taken by the narrator. See below.

⁴⁹ Lampert, Laurence, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 19Google Scholar; Weinberger, Jerry, “Science and Rule in Bacon's Utopia,” American Political Science Review 70, no. 3 (1976): 871CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ De Augmentis, VIII. 3. There are some grounds for suspecting that Bacon may have been working on New Atlantis around the same time that he penned this remark. Spedding notes that in the Latin edition, Rawley's note to the reader contains a possible reference to De Augmentis, suggesting that Bacon may have been working on the two works around the same time. See note 13 above.

⁵¹ None of which is to suggest that these observations depend on Rawley's note. Lampert, Nietzsche, 27; Weinberger, “Science and Rule,” 869–72.

⁵² White, Peace Among the Willows, 116; Weinberger New Atlantis, xiv; Clay and Purvis, Four Island Utopias, 119; Lampert, Nietzsche, 28, 46; Yaffe, Shylock, 99; Faulkner, Project of Progress, 234.

⁵³ Faulkner is a partial exception, for he suggests that the title may refer to a “new continent” (Project of Progress, 243), but he also occasionally refers to the island of Bensalem as “New Atlantis.”

⁵⁴ In the essay “Of Prophesies,” which includes one of Bacon's not infrequent references to the Atlantis story, he apparently misnames the Critias “Atlanticus.” According to Michael Kiernan, “some Renaissance Latin translations (e.g., Geneva, 1578) subtitle [the Critias] ‘sive Atlanticus’” (Bacon, , The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall), 254Google Scholar. Still, Bacon knew Greek, and as we will see, it is the Timaeus that is particularly important to understanding New Atlantis.

⁵⁵ On the relationship between the Timaeus-Critias and the Republic I have found the following works especially helpful: Kalkavage, Peter, “Introduction” to Plato's Timaeus (Newburyport: Focus, 2001)Google Scholar; Benardete, Seth, “On the Timaeus,” in The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Lampert, Laurence and Planeaux, Christopher, “Who's Who in Plato's Timaeus-Critias and Why,” Review of Metaphysics 52, no.1 (1998): 87–125Google Scholar; and Zuckert, Catherine, Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6.

⁵⁶ It could be replied that Atlantis too is imaginary, and thus “utopian” in one literal sense of the word. Yaffe, who takes the title to refer to Bensalem, nevertheless notes that the title points towards a bid at global conquest (Shylock, 109).

⁵⁷ “The New Atlantis is, I believe, the only Baconian work, certainly the only major Baconian work, which is directed primarily against Plato” (White, Peace Among the Willows, 112). “Plato's Atlantis is replaced by Bacon's New Atlantis … Bacon's Atlantis aimed to succeed where Plato's Atlantis failed: Bacon's new Atlantis aspired to bring the whole of Europe under its imperial sway” (Lampert and Planeaux, “Who's Who,” 122).

⁵⁸ A number of the work's better readers have noticed the strangeness of the title: White, Peace Among the Willows, 135; Paterson, “The Politics,” 93; Weinberger, New Atlantis, xiii.

⁵⁹ Following Howard White, I date the story by identifying the remarked-upon increase in European seafaring (51–52) with Columbus. I concede, as does White, that it is speculative (Peace Among the Willows, 82), but given the explicit (and curious) mention of Columbus and context of that mention, this is the only plausible date.

⁶⁰ At the same time, or nearly, Tyrambel, or Mexico, also invades the Mediterranean. The passage is obscure, however, and Weinberger is uncertain as to whether the Atlantans did or did not mind their own business (New Atlantis, xxii). We take “And for the former of these…” to refer to Atlantis.

⁶¹ Notice that this last detail stands in direct contradiction to what the governor of the Stranger's House just said: that in the flood all the people in the lowlands perished. See note 65 below.

⁶² The priest-governor indicates as much: “I shall now give you an account by itself: and it will draw nearer to give you satisfaction to your principal question” (56).

⁶³ If only for its challenge to the biblical chronology and the claim of Atlantis's Neptunic origins, Plato's Critias's story cannot be simply accepted by a Christian priest. (But notice he objects to Plato's account on the basis of geographical fact; are we to understand that he believes divine revenge to be limited by nature? In this regard, see note 68 below.) In any event, the priest-governor's dismissal is no more Bacon's than Critias's (Timaeus 26d) is Plato's. As De Sapientia Veterum makes clear, Bacon calls “fables” what Plato would call muthoi, and as we have seen, New Atlantis is, on Bacon's own terms, “poetical” and possibly also “fabulous.” Perhaps it is in this light that we should read Rawley's characterization of New Atlantis as a “fable.”

⁶⁴ Quotations from the Timaeus are from Kalkavage's translation, cited above (note 55).

⁶⁵ Notice that here in the restatement the destruction of the highlands by fire is not mentioned at all. See “Of Vicissitude of Things,” and consider the conclusion of the Critias. It would seem that the rude and savage mountain people are never destroyed altogether.

⁶⁶ Howard White comes closest (Peace Among the Willows, 123–24). Clay and Purvis offer an alternative, but they too get the analogy wrong (Four Island Utopias, 50). Kate Aughterson also misses the analogy: “New Atlantis deliberately reverses other journeys—in journeying to the new world they find the oldest world of all, Plato's history of Atlantis is contradicted” (“‘The Waking Vision’: Reference in the New Atlantis,” Renaissance Quarterly 45, no.1 [1992]: 121).

⁶⁷ Nov. Org., I. 73; New Atlantis, 82–83; PFB, 90–91. As we will note below, however, Bensalem refrains from bestowing “divine” honors on inventors.

⁶⁸ Which in the the case of Bacon's tale seems to imply a questioning of the completeness of the biblical account.

⁶⁹ Taking “in regard” to mean only “since,” Weinberger misses the possibility that the Bensalemites are close to the Atlantans not only geographically. This double entendre could indicate that the Bensalemites are Atlantis-friends, just as the Egyptians are Athens-friends. Notice, it is the Coyans and not the Atlantans who attacked Bensalem.

⁷⁰ Although taking a different route, Faulkner arrives at a similar point (Project of Progress, 234). I credit this remark as inspiring my reading of New Atlantis.

⁷¹ PFB, 120–21, 86–87; see also Nov. Org., I. 122.

⁷² Paterson, “The Politics,” 89; Faulkner, Project of Progress, 233–36.

⁷³ This erotic language is Bacon's own, or rather that of his Joabin; see especially New Atlantis, 65–68. Note that it is this same character named Joabin who arranges the interview with the Father of Salomon's House (69–70).

⁷⁴ We thus come down on the side of those, such as Robert Faulkner, Howard White, Charles Whitney, and Timothy Reiss, who discern an imperial direction in Bacon's political thought. And it would seem, on the basis of the Atlantis-America connection, that Bacon may already have America or the Americas in mind as the site or focus of this new global empire. He was a member of both the Newfoundland and Virginia companies, and as the essay “Of Plantations” makes plain, he gave the matter of colonies considerable thought.

⁷⁵ For help on this crucial question I direct the reader to Minkov's, Svetozar recent essay, “The Human Good and the Problem of Bacon's Intention,” Interpretation 35, no. 3 (2008): 265–82Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Laws 797d–799c; cf. 656c–657c. Notice that in this respect the Egyptians are the model. It would seem that both Plato and Bacon approve of the Egyptian device of making innovators gods, though for opposite reasons.

⁷⁷ Then again, Bensalem's history is not without some very significant changes, though they all at least appear to come from without.

⁷⁸ See note 48 above.

⁷⁹ See note 17 above.

⁸⁰ The Europeans refer to Bensalem as happy three times before the midpoint of the tale (45, 46, 50; cf. 63).

⁸¹ “First therefore in this, as in all things which are practical, we ought to cast up our account, what is in our power, and what is not” (The Advancement, II. xxii.3).

⁸² See Aristotle Politics 1324b40–25a5, 1325b15–28.

⁸³ “But howsoever it be for Happinesse, without all Question, for Greatnesse, it maketh, to bee still, for the most Part, in Armes” (The Essayes, “Of the True Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates,” 97).