The New Atlantis In 1623, Bacon expressed his aspirations and ideals in
New Atlantis. Released in 1627, this was his creation of an ideal land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit" were the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of Bensalem. The name
Bensalem means , having obvious resemblance with
Bethlehem (birthplace of Jesus), and is referred to as "God's bosom, a land unknown", in the last page of the work. In this utopian work, written in literary form, a group of Europeans travels west from Peru by boat. After having suffered with strong winds at sea and fearing for death, they "did lift up their hearts and voices to God above, beseeching him of his mercy". After that incident, these travellers in a distant water finally reached the island of Bensalem, where they found a fair and well-governed city, and were received kindly and with all humanity by Christian and cultured people, who had been converted centuries before by a miracle wrought by
Saint Bartholomew, twenty years after the Ascension of Jesus, by which the scriptures had reached them in a mysterious ark of cedar floating on the sea, guarded by a gigantic pillar of light, in the form of a column, over which was a bright cross of light. Many aspects of the society and history of the island are described, such as the Christian religion; a cultural feast in honour of the family institution, called "the Feast of the Family"; a college of sages, the Salomon's House, "the very eye of the kingdom", to which order "God of heaven and earth had vouchsafed the grace to know the works of Creation, and the secrets of them", as well as "to discern between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts"; and a series of instruments, process and methods of scientific research that were employed in the island by the Salomon's House. The end of their foundation is thus described: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible". A city named
Bensalem was founded in Pennsylvania, in 1682. Despite being posthumously published in 1626,
New Atlantis has an important place in Bacon's corpus. While his scientific treatises, such as
The Advancement and
Novum, are prescriptive in tone, advising how European thought must change through the adoption of the new scientific mindset,
New Atlantis offers a look at what Bacon envisions as the ultimate fruition of his instauration. This text pictures Bacon's dream of a society organized around his epistemological and social agenda. In many ways Bacon's utopian text is a cumulative work: the predominant themes Bacon consistently returns to throughout his intellectual life—the dominance over Nature through experimentalism, the notion of a charitable form of knowledge, and the complementary relationship between religion and science—are very much foregrounded in New Atlantis, becoming the pillars of Bensalemite culture.
Essays Bacon's
Essays were first published in 1597 as
Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion. Seene and Allowed. There were only ten essays in this version, relatively aphoristic and brief in style. A much-enlarged second edition appeared in 1612, with 38 essays. Another, under the title
Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, was published in 1625 with 58 essays. Bacon considered the
Essays "but as recreation of my other studies", and they draw on previous writers such as
Michel de Montaigne and
Aristotle. The Essays were praised by his contemporaries and have remained in high repute ever since; 19th-century literary historian
Henry Hallam wrote that "They are deeper and more discriminating than any earlier, or almost any later, work in the English language". Bacon's coinages such as "hostages to fortune" and "jesting Pilate" have survived into modern English, with 91 quotations from the
Essays in the 1999 edition of
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the statue of Philosophy in the U.S.
Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., is labelled with quotation "the inquiry, knowledge, and belief of truth is the sovereign good of human nature" from
Of Truth. The 1625 essay
Of Gardens, in which Bacon says that "God Almighty first planted a Garden; and it is indeed the purest of human pleasures [...], the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man", was influential upon the imagination of subsequent garden owners in England.
The Wisdom of the Ancients The Wisdom of the Ancients is a book written by Bacon in 1609, and published in Latin, in which he claims playfully to unveil the hidden meanings and teachings behind ancient Greek fables. The book opens with two dedications: one to the Earl of Salisbury, the other to the University of Cambridge. This is followed by a detailed preface, in which Bacon explains how ancient wisdom is contained within the fables. He opens the preface stating that fables are the poets' veiling of the "most ancient times that are buried in oblivion and silence". He retells thirty-one ancient fables, suggesting that they contain hidden teachings on varied issues such as morality, philosophy, religion, civility, politics, science, and art. In doing this, Bacon advocates for a break from the past while also imagining connection to "an ancient, but previously lost, precedent for free inquiry". This work, not having a strictly scientific nature as other better-known works, has been reputed among Bacon's literary works. However, two of the chapters, "Cupid; or the Atom", and "
Proteus; or Matter" may be considered part of Bacon's scientific philosophy. Bacon describes in "Cupid" his vision of the nature of the atom and of matter itself. 'Love' is described as the force or the "instinct" of primal matter, "the natural motion of the atom", "the summary law of nature, that impulse of desire impressed by God upon the primary particles of matter which makes them come together, and which by repetition and multiplication produces all the variety of nature", "a thing which mortal thought may glance at, but can hardly take in". The myth of Proteus serves, according to Bacon, to adumbrate the path to extracting truth from matter. In his interpretation of the myth, Bacon finds Proteus to symbolize all matter in the universe: "For the person of Proteus denotes matter, the oldest of all things, after God himself; that resides, as in a cave, under the vast concavity of the heavens" Much of Bacon's explanation of the myth deals with Proteus's ability to elude his would-be captors by shifting into various forms: "But if any skillful minister of nature shall apply force to matter, and by design torture and vex it…it, on the contrary…changes and transforms itself into a strange variety of shapes and appearances…so that at length, running through the whole circle of transformations, and completing its period, it in some degree restores itself, if the force be continued." (See
Wisdom of the Ancients in Wikisource.)
Masculine Birth of Time In (
The Masculine Birth of Time, 1603), a posthumously published text, Bacon first writes about the relationship between science and religion. The text consists of an elderly teacher's lecturing his student on the dangers of classical philosophy. Through the voice of the teacher, Bacon demands a split between religion and science: "By mixing the divine with the natural, the profane with the sacred, heresies with mythology, you have corrupted, O you sacrilegious impostor, both human and religious truth." Much of the text consists of the elderly guide tracing the corruption of human knowledge though classical philosopher to a contemporary alchemist. Bacon's elderly guide commences his diatribe against ancient philosophers with Aristotle, who initially leads, for Bacon, the human mind awry by turning its attention toward words: "Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favoring gale, had found the rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings. He composed an art or manual of madness and made us slaves to words." As Bacon develops further throughout his scientific treatises, Aristotle's crime of duping the intellect into the belief that words possess an intrinsic connection with Nature confused the subjective and the objective. The text identifies the goal of the elderly guide's instructions as the student's ability to engage in a (re)productive relationship with Nature: "My dear, dear boy, what I propose is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy, and legal wedlock." Although, as the text presents it, the student has not yet reached that point of intellectual and sexual maturity, the elderly guide assures him that once he has properly distanced himself from Nature he will then be able to bring forth "a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen who will overcome the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race." ====== A collection of religious meditations by Lord Bacon, published in 1597. Among the texts of his
Sacred Meditations are: •
Of The Works of God and Man •
Of The Miracles of our Saviour •
Of The Innocence of the Dove, and the Wisdom of the Serpent •
Of The Exaltation of Charity •
Of The Moderation of Cares •
Of Earthly Hope •
Of Hypocrites •
Of Impostors •
Of Several kinds of imposture •
Of Atheism •
Of Heresies •
Of The Church and the Scriptures Theological Tracts Collection of Lord Bacon's prayers, published after his death. Among the prayers of his
Theological Tracts are: •
A Prayer, or Psalm, made by the Lord Bacon, Chancellor of England •
A Prayer made and used by the Lord Chancellor Bacon •
The Student's Prayer •
The Writer's Prayer •
A Confession of Faith An Advertisement Touching a Holy War This treatise, that is among those which were published after Bacon's death and were left unfinished, is written in the form of debate. In it, there are six characters, each representing a sector of society: Eusebius, Gamaliel, Zebedeus, Martius, Eupolis, and Pollio, representing respectively: a moderate divine, a Protestant zealot, a Roman Catholic zealot, a military man, a politician, and a courtier. In the work, the six characters debate on whether it is lawful or not for Christendom to engage in a
holy war against infidels, such as the Turks, for the purpose of an expansion of the Christian religion – many different arguments and viewpoints being expressed by the characters. The work is left unfinished; it does not come to a conclusive answer to the question in a debate. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have argued, based on this treatise, that Bacon was not as idealistic as his utopian works suggest, rather that he was what might today be considered an advocate of genocidal eugenics. They see in it a defense of the elimination of detrimental societal elements by the English and compared this to the endeavors of Hercules while establishing a civilized society in ancient Greece. The work itself, however, being a dialogue, expresses both militarists' and pacifists' discourses debating each other, and does not come to any conclusion since it was left unfinished. Laurence Lampert has interpreted Bacon's treatise
An Advertisement Touching a Holy War as advocating "
spiritual warfare against the spiritual rulers of European civilization." This interpretation might be considered symbolical, for there is no hint of such an advocacy in the work itself. The work was dedicated to
Lancelot Andrews, Bishop of Winchester and counselor of the estate to
King James.
Bacon's personal views on war and peace While Bacon's personal views on war and peace might be dubious in some writings, he thus expressed them in a letter of advice to
Sir George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham:
Translation of certain psalms into English verse Published in 1625 and considered to be the last of his writings, Bacon translated 7 of the
Psalms of
David (numbers 1, 12, 90, 104, 126, 137, 149) to English in verse form, in which he shows his poetical skills. (
See it in Wikisource.) == Juridical works ==