THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of a ‘Novum Organum’. Disdain for mathematics prevented Bacon from having a vision of production, but his vision of the fruits is all the richer. Bacon's technological
prophecy is unique; his ‘book of desiderata’ more or less contains modern technology in wishful outline and goes beyond it. The head of Solomon's House declares
they have means of producing artificial rain or even snow and artificial mountain air. They cultivate new varieties of plants and fruit in hothouses, they shorten the
ripening process, mix the species of animals according to their needs, mineralize their baths, and produce artificial minerals and building materials.* Vivisection is not
lacking: ‘We try also all poisons and other medicines upon them [beasts and birds], as well of chirurgery as physic.’ The Atlantians are acquainted with the telephone
and no less so with the submarine: ‘We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances (ad magnam distantiam et in lineis
tortuosis). … we have ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas.’ The microphone is not lacking either: ‘We represent small sounds as great and
deep; likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp’; Atlantis is even acquainted, incredibile dictu, with the most modern quarter­tone technique: ‘We have harmonies
which you have not, of quarter­sounds (quadrantes sonorum), and lesser slides of sounds.’ There is a telescope and a microscope: ‘We have also glasses and means to
see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly; as the shapes and colours of small flies and worms, grains and flaws in gems, which cannot otherwise be seen;
observations in urine and blood, not otherwise to be seen.’ Solomon's House further harbours aeroplanes, steam­engines, water­turbines and still other ‘Magnalia
naturae’, ‘feats of nature’, with it and beyond it. Thus ‘New Atlantis’ is not merely the first technologically reflective utopia, in fact d'Alembert called this work (thus
surpassing the wishful models of fairytales themselves) ‘un catalogue immense de ce qui reste à découvrir’.† Bacon's work is, even subsequently, the only utopia of
classical status which gives decisive status to the technological productive forces of the better life. Unlike in real life at any rate, the mechanical world and the economicsocial
one were not always linked in utopias. Bacon's ‘New Atlantis’ would have deserved emulation here, one seriously corresponding to technological development
and its immanent possibilities.
* Bloch gives a direct quotation here, but the unreliable translation he is using has again condensed the original. The full text in which these ideas are found is not
included here because of its length. it may be found in Spedding's edition, Vol. III, pp. 157–62. We have set the ‘quotation’ in indirect speech here.
† ‘an immense catalogue of what remains to be discovered’.