Such words in His things: the poetry in Bacon’s new science

Abstract

Francis Bacon’s utopian fragment New Atlantis was originally prized by its 17th-century readers for its connection with the ‘Great Instauration’ (the author’s plan for reforming the sciences), and for its close link with Sylva Sylvarum, the natural history with which it was first published. Modern scholarship has ignored the importance of Sylva to New Atlantis, which was intended to demonstrate how advances gained through the Instauration might actually be implemented for the greater benefit of humankind. I hope to show that, although Bacon’s more theoretical philosophical treatises argue for a scientific method purged of fanciful language and back-door theology, the ‘simpler’, more referential language used in Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis nevertheless demonstrates the author’s clear recognition that the success of the new science depended to some extent upon the strength of its figurative language, and that very often it was through the ‘poetry’ of metaphor, analogy and symbol that religion was re-inserted back into Bacon’s natural philosophy.