SOURCE: "Scientific Utopia: New Atlantis," in Sir Francis Bacon, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1966, pp. 170-78.

In the following excerpt, Green briefly reviews the probable sources and the content of the New Atlantis.

The New Atlantis, the most imaginative of Bacon's works, is a "fable"—as Dr. William Rawley referred to it when he published the unfinished work in 1627—intended to be used as a model of a college for the interpretation of nature "and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men under the name of Salomon's House, or the College of the Six Days' Works." Rawley says in his address to the reader that "the model is more vast and high than can possibly be imitated in all things; notwithstanding most things therein are within men's power to effect." Bacon was creating a pattern "of the best state," for which he had planned to...