Perspective

Francis Bacon is the primary perspective in New Atlantis and The Great Instauration. The only other perspective of any sort is that of the sailor who narrates the New Atlantis. As discussed elsewhere in the guide, Francis Bacon was one of the great modern philosophers who helped to create the scientific method and propagate it. He is responsible for dislodging the hold that Scholasticism had in Britain and ultimately in other parts of Europe and he was a great lawyer, author and statements, who eventually became Lord Chancellor.

Bacon, accordingly, is a man who believes powerfully in science, who finds dogma destructive and stultifying and who is eager to affect a complete intellectual revolution in England. In fact, Bacon has such a strong sense of his own power and influence that he believed he could set down, by himself, an entirely new method of reasoning that would give...