THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
things, the world will be merely the raw material of whatever Utopia man
may decide to make.
3. THE UTOPIA OF SCIENCE
To perfect science so, and then to perfect social order by putting science
in control, would itself be Utopia enough. Such is the world described for
us in Bacon's brief fragment and last work, The New Atlantis, published
two years before his death. Wells thinks it Bacon's "greatest service to
science" 96 to have drawn for us, even so sketchily, the picture of a society
in which at last science has its proper place as the master of things; it was
a royal act of imagination by which for three centuries one goal has been
held in view by the great army of warriors in the battle of knowledge and
invention against ignorance and poverty. Here in these few pages we have
the essence and the "form" of Francis Bacon, the law of his being and
his life, the secret and continuous aspiration of his soul.
Plato in the Timaeus^ had told of the old legend of Atlantis, the
sunken continent in the Western seas. Bacon and others identified the
new America of Columbus and Cabot with this old Atlantis; the great
continent had not sunk after all, but only men's courage to navigate the
sea. Since this old Atlantis was now known, and seemed inhabited by a
race vigorous enough, but not quite like the brilliant Utopians of Bacon'?
fancy, he conceived of a new Atlantis, an isle in that distant Pacific which
only Drake and Magellan had traversed, an isle distant enough from
Europe and from knowledge to give generous scope to the Utopian
imagination.
The story begins in the most artfully artless way, like the great tales
of Defoe and Swift. "We sailed from Peru (where we had continued fo*
the space of one whole year), for China and Japan by the South Sea."
Came a great calm, in which the ships for weeks lay quietly on the boundless
ocean like specks upon a mirror, while the provisions of the adven-
turers ebbed away. And then resistless winds drove the vessels pitilessly
north and north and north, out of the island-dotted south into an endless
wilderness of sea. The rations were reduced, and reduced again, and
again reduced; and disease took hold of the crew. At last, when they had
resigned themselves to death, they saw, almost unbelieving, a fair island
looming up under the sky. On the shore, as their vessel neared it, they
saw not savages, but men simply and yet beautifully clothed, clean, and
manifestly of developed intelligence. They were permitted to land, but
were told that the island government allowed no strangers to remain.
Nevertheless, since some of the crew were sick, they might all stay till
these were well again.
During the weeks of convalescence the wanderers unraveled, day by
"Outline of History, ch. xxxv, sect 6. "Sect. 25.