Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his Elizabethan contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening Providence, the Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of course, and governed more or less their conceptions of the history of civilisation.  But, I think, we may say that Bacon, while he formally acknowledged it, did not press it or emphasise it. [Footnote:  See Advancement, iii.  II.  On the influence of the doctrine on historical writing in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century see Firth, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (Proc. of British Academy, vol. viii., 1919), p. 8.]

5.

Bacon illustrated his view of the social importance of science in his sketch of an ideal state, the New Atlantis.  He completed only a part of the work, and the fragment was published after his death. [Footnote:  In 1627.  It was composed about 1623.  It seems almost certain that he was acquainted with the Christianopolis of Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), which had appeared in Latin in 1614, and contained a plan for a scientific college to reform the civilised world.  Andreae, who was acquainted both with More and with Campanella, placed his ideal society in an island which he called Caphar Salama (the name of a village in Palestine).  Andreae’s work had also a direct influence on the Nova Solyma of Samuel Gott (1648).  See the Introduction of F. E. Held to his edition of Christianopolis (1916).  In Macaria, another imaginary state of the seventeenth century (A description of the famous Kingdoms of Macaria, 1641, by Hartlib), the pursuit of science is not a feature.] It is evident that the predominating interest that moved his imagination was different from that which guided Plato.  While Plato aimed at securing a permanent solid order founded on immutable principles, the design of Bacon was to enable his imaginary community to achieve dominion over nature by progressive discoveries.  The heads of Plato’s city are metaphysicians, who regulate the welfare of the people by abstract doctrines established once for all; while the most important feature in the New Atlantis is the college of scientific investigators, who are always discovering new truths which may alter the conditions of life.  Here, though only in a restricted field, an idea of progressive improvement, which is the note of the modern age, comes in to modify the idea of a fixed order which exclusively prevailed in ancient speculation.

On the other hand, we must not ignore the fact that Bacon’s ideal society is established by the same kind of agency as the ideal societies of Plato and Aristotle.  It has not developed; it was framed by the wisdom of an original legislator Solamona.  In this it resembles the other imaginary commonwealths of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  The organisation of More’s Utopia is fixed initially once for all by the lawgiver Utopus.  The origin of Campanella’s Civitas Solis is not expressly stated, but there can be no doubt that he conceived its institutions as created by the fiat of a single lawgiver.  Harrington, in his Oceana, argues with Machiavelli that a commonwealth, to be well turned, must be the work of one man, like a book or a building. [Footnote:  Harrington, Oceana, pp. 77-8, 3rd ed. (1747).]