The New Atlantis by Sir Francis Bacon

Picture from the Yale Library

Utopia is a name for an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was invented by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. (Wikipedia)

We all have individual ideas of Utopia. New Atlantis, published in 1626, is Bacon’s idea of a Utopian world. The island is called Bensalem where people of all races and religion live together in harmony but leaning much more towards Christianity. The people are honest, generous, pious, and enlightened. There is an ideal college “Solomon House” where they study pure and applied science. In Bensalem religion and science co-exist perfectly. Bacon coined the phrase “Knowledge is Power”.

It is theorized that Bacon was hoping that America would be a model of this utopian world. There are many controversial ideas in the novel but it’s amazing all the wonderful ideas that Bacon foresees. Towards the end of the novel he describes all the things they have discovered, here’s an example:

"We have also furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of heats; fierce and quick, strong and constant, soft and mild, blown, quiet, dry, moist, and the like. But above all we have heats, in imitation of the sun's and heavenly bodies' heats, that pass divers inequalities, and as it were orbs, progresses, and returns whereby we produce admirable effects… Instruments also which generate heat only by motion. And farther, places for strong insulations; and, again, places under the earth, which by nature or art yield heat. These divers heats we use as the nature of the operation which we intend requireth.”