SOURCE: "Sir Francis Bacon and the Ideal Society," in Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 105-37.

In the following excerpt, Davis closely examines the structure and content of the New Atlantis with a view to clarifying "the scope and the crucial limitations of Bacon's approach to his ideal society."

'Ambivalence' has been seen as one of the central characteristics of the social thought of Sir Francis Bacon. He is the 'preemptory royalist' who helped to provide an intellectual basis for 'the English Revolution'; the scientific modernist consigning all past philosophy to oblivion yet unable to shake off the mental habits of the scholastic, the jargon of the alchemist and magician; the analyst of the imperfections of the human mind, carefully planning the retrieval of its dominion over nature; a constructer of self-consuming artefacts; pessimistic and optimistic, conservative and...