SOURCE: "Science Against Man in Bacon," in Bucknell Review, Vol. VII, No. 3, March, 1958, pp. 158-73.

In the excerpt below, Warhaft points out the limitations and dangers implied by Bacon's method for a scientific utopia, arguing that he lacks the "cultivation of the entire person, " as well as "a thorough, energetic, and systematic development of the potentialities of the human as an essentially social and moral being." For these reasons, Warhaft concludes that the New Atlantis' Utopian ends are not necessarily met, and submits that his model may have contributed to the imperfections of contemporary society.

Somewhere in New Atlantis amid the caves, towers, lakes, wells, chambers, baths, orchards, enclosures, breweries, dispensatories, and furnaces—somewhere, somehow, in the midst of all this Baconian plenty, lives man. Religious, moral, compassionate, and content, man owes his place in this best of all impossible worlds to the aims and means of the...