THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Apart from the fact that the technological component never appeared in any novel of an ideal state other than as ornamentation, social utopias, as is clear in the case of
Owen, often even lagged behind the technological level attained by their age. Aside from Bacon, only Campanella at best forms an exception here, in so far as he too
dreams of unborn technology, indeed of unborn architecture, though without Bacon's powerful wit. Delighting in invention almost as much as Bacon, he predicts in the
‘Civitas solis’ that ‘the development of the printing press and of magnetism will fill the coming centuries with more history than the world foresaw in four thousand
years’. But Campanella's utopia could exist even without these breakthroughs in existing nature, it even contradicts them in its astrologically static form. Whereas ‘New
Atlantis’ seeks to lie in every respect beyond the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. beyond the binding of given nature. Bacon's fragment, in its technological optimism, does not
even recognize catastrophes any more, there is no longer any firedamp in the controlled earth. There is of course no mention of the firedamps which fill not nature but
uncontrolled human history, of the various burning Troys. Fate appears to be so restrained in purely technological terms that Solomon's House already seems to have
coped with it before Solomon's State has even developed. The question as to what men should do with their knowledge and power, within the social nature which
Bacon, the fallen Lord Chancellor, had not found to be wholly without catastrophes, is not yet posed by Bacon the philosopher in this fragment of his; shortly before the
question concerning the best state the ‘New Atlantis’ breaks off. But the outlines of the unwritten sequel, concerning Solomon's kingdom, can be guessed perfectly well
from the philosopher's other works. Guessed in contrast to a mechanization made absolute; for Bacon, contrary to popular opinion, is neither a pure utilitarian nor a
pure empiricist. However much he praises the life of active invention, he still gives precedence to the life of reason: ‘So must we likewise from experience of every kind
first endeavour to discover true causes and axioms; and seek for experiments of Light, not for experiments of Fruit.’* Only a balance between the contemplative and
the active life appears correct and salutary to the dreamer of the ‘New Atlantis’: ‘But this is that which will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and
action may be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been; a conjunction like unto that of the two highest planets, Saturn the planet of
rest and
* ‘Novum Organum’, Aphorism 70.