Public reader discussion about New Atlantis in the WeRead Catalog by Francis Bacon.
By Bolter49
You know how Atlantis is basically a real-world legend—some city that sank and got wiped out. I’m wondering if New Atlantis could end up in the same kind of trouble depending on what people decide. Am I just overthinking it, or is there something to this?
By Panther7
I’m trying to figure out how Bacon connects religion and science in New Atlantis and The Great Instauration. My read is that he’s pushing for a more material, step-by-step way of finding truth instead of the more philosophical, “big ideas” kind of thinking that seems closer to religion, but I don’t feel like I have enough concrete examples yet. If someone’s got a better handle on it, I’d really appreciate any thoughts or passages to look at.
By indigo_field1992
From what I’ve gotten through in the summary, it feels really focused on those “enlightenment” ideas. Like, the gist is that society would basically be perfect if intellectuals ran things and knowledge mattered most. Not sure how much I’m buying that, but that’s the vibe I’m getting from the overview.
By Garden
So I read about *New Atlantis* (1627) and it’s kind of interesting, but it’s also incomplete, which makes it feel unfinished in a weird way. Bacon basically sketches out this hopeful future where people put a lot into learning and knowledge, and it’s all set on this made-up island, Bensalem, that a European crew finds after getting lost in the Pacific somewhere west of Peru. The whole story is pretty light on plot and more about slowly showing you how the place works—like the people supposedly live by things like generosity, piety, and public spirit. And the big focus is this state-run scientific place called Salomon’s House. I’m not totally sure how the whole thing would feel if it were longer, but even with what we have, it definitely reads like an early model for a research university, with both the practical and the more pure science side.
By fork
Francis Drake ended up taking a bunch of Spanish ships and coming back with a lot of gold, supposedly on Queen Elizabeth’s orders. Then there’s this whole other angle where Elizabeth is tied to Francis Bacon somehow, and Drake allegedly gave his captains stuff for the Queen and it just… disappeared. I’ve also been looking into the theory that Drake didn’t keep all that gold on him at all, and instead hid tons of it on Oak Island and told Elizabeth. After she died, I’m guessing he looped Bacon in on the whole pit/storage deal, and then Bacon supposedly had the Rosicrucians move his manuscripts and even the “Shakespeare” copies, plus his part in the Latin-to-English Bible translation, into some separate vault section at Oak Island. Honestly it feels like a huge claim, but if it’s even partly right, that’s a pretty big deal. Thoughts?
By luckypencil7
I was listening to a podcast about Sir Francis Bacon, and then it hit me out of nowhere that I could connect it to Lost. I went looking for it afterward (Google and a bunch of searching), but I didn’t see anything about Bacon anywhere, at least not that I could find. So either I’m stretching hard, or maybe there’s something real here. Lost already throws in a ton of Enlightenment/philosopher stuff pretty openly—Locke, Bentham, Rousseau, Hume, all of that, plus the show keeps touching big philosophy themes and even uses names like Tabula Rasa and The Greater Good. There’s a whole page on the Lost wiki for the philosophers it references, so it’s not subtle. But it’s kind of weird that Bacon seems totally absent from that list. Then I remembered Bacon’s novel *The New Atlantis*. He writes about a made-up island called Bensalem that sounds a lot like Lost’s island. The basic vibe is: the outside world can’t really see it, but the people there are aware of the outside. It’s also found after a boat wrecks there, and the place has its own “learned” society—Bacon talks about the island having this pretty “clean”/protected culture, they speak Scholastic Latin (with Greek and Hebrew too), and there’s a big state-run research institution—Saloman’s House—that’s basically all about science experiments and pushing human knowledge. There are even inventors trying to mess with stuff like perpetual motion and other “physics won’t allow it” ideas. That whole setup feels pretty similar to what Lost does. One more thing I can’t fully ignore: “Ben Linus” feels like it could be a nod to “Bensalem” (like Ben/Salem is close), but I know that might be reaching. So yeah… am I seeing patterns that aren’t there, or is it possible Bacon is actually referenced and I just happened to notice it first? What do you all think?