Twelve fellows of the college travel into foreign lands to bring back books and abstracts, and reports on experiments and inventions. Three make a digest of experiments. Three collect the experiments of all the mechanical arts, and also of practices which are not brought into the arts. Three try new experiments. Three devote themselves to classifications; and another three, known as dowry men or benefactors, look into the experiments of their fellows and cast about for means of applying them to human life and knowledge. Three fellows consult with the whole body of scientific workers and plan new channels of investigation; and three, who are called interpreters of nature, attempt to raise the results of particular investigations into general observations and axioms.
In telling all this, as in the rest of his New Atlantis, Bacon is incredibly childish and incoherent: he gives such a description of Salomon’s House as a six-year-old schoolboy might give of a visit to the Rockefeller Foundation. Beneath these maladroit interpretations, however, we see that Bacon had a grasp on some of the fundamentals of scientific research, and of the part that science might play in the “relief of man’s estate.” It is nothing more than a hint, this New Atlantis; but a word to the wise is enough; and as we look about the modern world we see that, in its material affairs at any rate, the great scientific institutes and foundations—the United States Bureau of Standards, for one—play a part not a little like that of the College of the Six Days’ Works.
Campanella with his dream of powerful mechanical inventions, in which he had been anticipated by Leonardo, and Bacon with his sketch of scientific institutes—with these two utopians we stand at the entrance to the utopia of means; that is to say, the place in which all that materially contributes to the good life has been perfected. The earlier utopias were concerned to establish the things which men should aim for in life. The utopias of the later Renaissance took these aims for granted and discussed how man’s scope of action might be broadened. In this the utopians only reflected the temper of their time; and did not attempt to remold it. As a result of our preoccupation with the means, we in the Western World live in an inventor’s paradise. Scientific knowledge and mechanical power we have to burn; more knowledge and more power than Bacon or Campanella could possibly have dreamed of. But today we face again the riddle that Plato, More, and Andreae sought to answer: what are men to do with their knowledge and power?
As we skip here and there through the Utopias of the next three centuries, this question gets more deeply impregnated in our minds.
VI
How something happened in the eighteenth century which made men “furiously to think,” and how a whole group of utopias sprang out of the upturned soil of industrialism.
I
There is a gap in the Utopian tradition between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the utopias of Denis Vayrasse and Simon Berington and the other romancers of this in-between period are in the line of Robinson Crusoe rather than The Republic.
One finds the clue to this lapse in Tiphaigne de la Roche’s Giphantia, a sketch of what was and what is and what will be, and in particular, an inquiry into the “Babylonian” mode of life. The author of Giphantia tells a parable about Sophia, the incarnation of Wisdom, who rejects the offers of the spendthrift, the merchant, the soldier, and the student, and accepts the suit of a diffident fellow who had retired in solitude to the country, to spend his days like a cultivated gentleman. One remembers the way in which Montaigne spent his declining years; one remembers Voltaire; and one sees how deeply the ideal of Robinson Crusoe—a cultivated Robinson Crusoe, surrounded with books and beyond the reach of any king and court—colored the deepest aspirations of this period. Rousseau, writing about the corrupting influence of the arts and sciences, and Chateaubriand, seeking the noble savage in the American wilderness and finding him in his own bosom—these men struck the dominating note of the eighteenth century. In a society that was already painfully artificial and “arranged” the institutes of Lycurgus and Utopus must have seemed as repressive as those of Louis XIV. So almost two centuries pass before we find any fresh regions to explore in Utopia.
II
The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and those of the later men of the Renaissance, arose, as I have pointed out, from the contrast between the possibilities that lay open beyond the sea and the dismal conditions that attended the breakdown of the town economy of the Middle Age. Like Plato’s Republic, it attempted to face the difficult problem of transition.
In the course of the next three centuries the adventure of exploring and ransacking strange countries loses its hold upon men’s imagination; and a new type of activity becomes the center of interest. The conquest of alien countries and the lure of gold do not indeed die out with this new interest; but they are subordinated to another type
