THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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contemplation, and Jupiter the planet of civil society and action’.* But Solomon's House is incorporated into an ultimately calm kingdom: the control of nature (in which
privation and catastrophes come to an end) serves in Bacon the establishment of a ‘regnum hominis’. This kingdom and goal of knowledge is in Bacon filled with the
hopes which early capitalism was still able to cherish for mankind through the unleashing of the forces of production: ‘Now the true and lawful goal of the sciences is
none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.’ (‘Novum Organum’, Aph. 81).† Mankind was to emerge from a world full of
epidemics, shortage crisis, and underproduction, from a world to which Bacon's admired Montaigne had called out: Grâce à l'homme, into the affluence which only
seemed attainable to earlier utopias by transferring them to a ‘paradisial nature’, into the affluence which precedes the regnum hominis as dinner precedes the dance.
The plan of ‘solomon's House’ has been fulfilled in the meantime by technical colleges and laboratories, beyond Bacon's dreams; there is still a long way to go as
regards the regnum hominis. And even the ‘production of artefacts’ in Bacon's sense, a not only Promethean but also artificial production, has not subsequently
abolished catastrophes in technology. Admittedly the contact with nature remained in the bourgeois economy and society which arrived, but it remained sufficiently
abstract and unmediated. Bacon's great maxim: ‘Natura parendo vincitur’, nature is conquered by obedience, remained active, but it was crossed by the interest of an
‘exploitation’ of nature, and thus by an interest which has nothing more to do with the natura naturans which Bacon still knows and singles out as the ‘causa causarum’.
let alone being allied to it. In this way there arose, alongside all the blessings, such a peculiarly artificial­abstract character in bourgeois technology that it can doubtless
also seem, in many of its cunning inventions, still ‘unnaturally’ founded and not just still inhumanly managed. ‘solomon's House’, so it seems, cannot do without Solomon
after all, that is, without natural wisdom. It contains, like all wisdom, reference to its opposite number, nature; the regnum hominis attained within it too, and not merely
above it, would then have it easier.
* ‘The Advancement of Learning’, Spedding, Vol. III, p. 294.
† Bloch quotes a much longer passage here, again from an unreliable translation. After the first sentence, it bears no relation to Bacon's Aphorism 81. We have omitted
the extraneous material and give only the opening of the original aphorism here.