The New Atlantis

Overview and Synopsis

The New Atlantis is an unfinished prose narrative by Francis Bacon that presents a vision of an ideal society structured around scientific inquiry, technological innovation, and Christian piety. Probably composed in the early 1620s and published after Bacon’s death in 1627, it belongs to the tradition of utopian literature, alongside works such as Thomas More’s Utopia, but is distinctively focused on the organization and aims of experimental science.

The story is framed as a travel narrative. A European ship, lost in the Pacific, comes upon the island of Bensalem, an isolated and prosperous commonwealth. The visitors are gradually introduced to Bensalem’s institutions, customs, and religion. The narrative culminates in a detailed account of Salomon’s House, a vast research institution devoted to the systematic study of nature and the production of beneficial inventions. The text breaks off before providing a complete description of the island’s laws and political constitution, reinforcing the sense that it is a fragmentary sketch rather than a finished utopia.

Philosophical Themes and Arguments

Although written in narrative form, The New Atlantis functions as a philosophical and programmatic work that dramatizes Bacon’s broader project for a reformation of knowledge, articulated more systematically in the Novum Organum and Instauratio Magna.

A central theme is the organization of scientific inquiry. Salomon’s House is portrayed as a hierarchical, collegial body of investigators with specialized roles. Its members conduct observations, experiments, and applications across a wide range of domains—meteorology, agriculture, medicine, mechanics, optics, and more. Bacon uses this institution to embody several key ideas:

• Collective and cooperative research: Knowledge is produced not by solitary geniuses but by collaborative, long-term institutional effort.
• Division of labor in inquiry: Different “orders” within Salomon’s House perform distinct tasks—gathering natural histories, devising experiments, interpreting results, and transforming findings into practical technologies.
• Experiment as method: The narrative lists numerous experimental devices and procedures, illustrating Bacon’s view that systematic experiment can extend human powers.

The work also develops Bacon’s ideal of “the relief of man’s estate”: the purpose of science is explicitly practical and philanthropic. Salomon’s House aims at 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.” Technologies hinted at include submarines, flying machines, advanced medical therapies, artificial metals, and optical instruments, prefiguring later developments.

At the same time, The New Atlantis explores the relationship between science, religion, and politics. Bensalem is explicitly Christian; its inhabitants venerate Scripture and observe a pious moral code. Bacon presents no conflict between religion and scientific practice; instead, Salomon’s House is sanctioned by divine authority and integrated into the commonwealth. This suggests an ideal of harmony between revelation and empirical inquiry, in which scientific exploration is framed as uncovering God’s creation.

Politically, the island is a monarchy with carefully regulated openness to foreigners. Knowledge and powerful technologies are, for the most part, kept secret from other nations. Salomon’s House determines which discoveries to reveal and which to withhold, depicting a regime in which scientific elites exercise significant authority over the flow of information. This has raised philosophical questions about epistemic authority, technocratic power, and secrecy. Proponents interpret this as an attempt to ensure that powerful knowledge is used responsibly; critics see in it a paternalistic and potentially authoritarian model of governance.

The work also gestures toward questions of morality and social life. Bensalem is depicted as chaste, orderly, and charitable. Practices such as the “Feast of the Family” highlight the value placed on household virtue and generational continuity. Yet the text reveals relatively little about legal structures, class divisions, or dissent, leading some commentators to view it as a partial and strategically selective utopia, focused primarily on institutionalizing Baconian science rather than providing a complete social blueprint.

Reception and Influence

Historically, The New Atlantis has been regarded as one of the foundational texts of scientific utopianism. Early modern readers linked Bacon’s fictional Salomon’s House with real-world projects to establish learned societies devoted to experimental philosophy. Members of the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, often invoked Bacon as an intellectual ancestor, and some interpreted their own institution as a partial realization of his vision.

The work has been influential in several domains:

• Philosophy of science: It offers an early literary representation of a research institute with stable funding, shared methods, and long-term aims. Philosophers and historians of science have used it to illuminate Bacon’s conception of method, experiment, and the social organization of inquiry.
• Political philosophy and science policy: The depiction of secrecy, control over dissemination, and the alignment of scientific goals with state purposes has informed debates about the governance of research, the role of expertise in political decision-making, and ethical limits on technological development.
• Utopian and dystopian literature: Later authors, from the Enlightenment to modern science fiction, have engaged with Bacon’s model, either by emulating the rational, technoscientific society he sketches or by critiquing it, emphasizing the risks of technocracy, surveillance, or dehumanization.

Critical perspectives vary. Some commentators emphasize the work’s optimistic confidence in human progress through science, seeing it as a charter myth for modernity’s faith in technology. Others stress its unfinished nature and internal tensions—between openness and secrecy, charity and control, piety and power—as signaling Bacon’s awareness of the moral and political ambiguities of scientific advancement.

Despite its brevity and fragmentary status, The New Atlantis continues to be read not only as a curiosity of early seventeenth-century literature but as a programmatic vision of how scientific institutions might be structured, what ends they should serve, and how they might be integrated into religious and political life. Its enduring significance lies in raising questions that remain central to contemporary reflections on the place of science in society.