Bacon's Vision of Scientific Institutions in New Atlantis

Bacon's unfinished utopian fiction New Atlantis was published posthumously in 1627, a year after his death, appended to a printed collection of his Sylva Sylvarum, a compendium of natural-historical observations. The narrative follows European sailors shipwrecked on the fictional island of Bensalem, somewhere in the Pacific, whose advanced and benevolent society is organized around a great research institution called Salomon's House (also styled the College of the Six Days' Works, alluding to the biblical days of creation), devoted to what Bacon terms "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." Bensalem's inhabitants are governed by explicitly Christian and monarchical values, and the fictional frame — an isolated, technologically superior yet morally ordered society encountered by outside voyagers, in the tradition established by Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602, published 1623) — allowed Bacon to dramatize, in concrete institutional detail, the collaborative research program that the Novum Organum had argued for only in the abstract.